On the ground: Eight hours to Manchester

So what can we expect up there? In Happy Monday land. With the not so happy Monday police. Or Tuesday. Or even Saturday for that matter.

£4.9 million on policing. And you can bet all the usual criminals will be there. The Metropolitan riot police, my good buddies the London Forward Intelligence Teams, the Met boys and girls along side their old G8 pals, Manchesters Queen's best.

The true extent of damage to democracy and civil rights will probably never be published, apart from on Indymedia, as the press will only be looking at the Labour convention after Saturday, leaving all kinds of hideous brutalities to take place.

Yes indeed, all the bad lot are back together again. I'm sure some will associate that with the mounting anarchist movement. Bloody squatters. Why don't they grow up, get a job and join the rest of us?

Probably because they refuse to join the hateful and self-loathing zombidom of "acceptable society". And I for one don't blame them. After all, I've been there. The career, the house, the car, the arsehole boss on too much cocaine who spends three days out of five on the golf course or in the whore house. Or being caught on camera sticking your head into the tits of a Belly Dancer during some kind of sick initiation process of the wierd handshake brigade.

No, this is not for me. Or many thousands of others. Possibly millions. Who knows how many until they all come together. You see, they, we, ain't falling for it anymore. The job, the house, the products, television, DVD collections, the best of Johnny Cash from HMV because only now, after 50 odd years of music and his death, does the corporate music world consider him worth marketing.

The must haves, the have nots - whatever - what is cool is decided by high-priced and blank-faced style and women's and men's magazines. This is in. That is out. Fit in or else. And don't mention the war. Not any of them. It's just not good dinner conversation.

Hell, that's what we are supposed to aspire to. No wonder several hundred thousand are expected in Manchester around noon tomorrow to say no to war, no to privatisation, to welfare and health cuts, to continued destruction of the environment and world purely for corporate profit, to the continuing databasing of every element of your life. And your children. Image a country where your child is taken from you and put into state care, excuse me, private corporate care, because a computer programmed around specially selected policy studies on what is acceptable an what is not. And all because someone, not you, has decided your off-spring could be a future anti-social behaviour problem .

Enough of the rants. So, how will it go? Will the anarchist block be attacked under the ruse of seizing the sound system? Will the Stop The War protestors make their protest then return home when the police say and feel they have struck a victorious blow to a government that now resembles the Thatcher weazels in more ways than one, now more than ever? Will the conference be raided by national drug squads to find the entire Labour cabinet downing steroids and slimming tablets, rinsing the deadly mixture of horse drugs and speed down with Isle of Dura whisky?

For now, the answer is wait and see. I need sleep and the booze isn't slowly me down any. I need calm music and my balding head stroking for at least one hour. And stop grinding my teeth. But one thing is for sure, never in this old hack's life has this kind of constant bombardment of protest against a government ever been so previlant, not in any mean or ferocious manner, but in the constant tapping away on a steady and constant course. There is no letting up. You dissenters have to calm down, take a holiday - I can't keep up.