Quick return to St Paul's

I get an email from the camp: 'One of the occupants at St Paul's has asked if you would like to re-do her portrait. She was very taken by it and was devastated that it was destroyed... I do not know her name but she has orange hair.'

The picture had suffered a mishap during ablutions - it's hard to manage a rolled-up cylinder of cartridge paper in camp conditions.

The girl is Jess. I find her eating noodles in the busy welfare tent which welcomes homeless people drawn to the camaraderie, free food and non-judgemental atmosphere. 'I'm going to get the picture scanned and send it to my future husband to show him what I look like,' she says. I think of portraits sent to Henry VIII on behalf of prospective wives. Someone gives her a box of fat pavement chalks. 'I'll do hopscotch,' she says.

I go to a lunch reception nearby and three of us carry the leftover food back to the camp. The professional chef running the kitchen tent makes a huge fuss of us, embracing us and lifting us off the ground. 'LOVE' is spelt out in tea lights on the food counter. A drunk rushes into the tent and pretends to vomit over the counter. He is tolerated.

Two volunteers unpack the food that we brought:

'Oh dear, pork pies.'

'YESSSSS!!!!!'

Outside, Dame Vivienne Westwood looks cold but is cheered when she warns the crowd not to reject the artists of the past.

The St Paul's Cathedral protest camp on Armistice Day

A homeless man shouts 'SEX!' from the top of the cathedral steps.

People are massing on the wide concourse. Just before the clock strikes eleven, the crowd forms a huge irregular circle holding hands, leaving the centre bare. At the last second new people slot into the circle on either side of me. The person holding my right hand is behind me. I can't turn round to look as I might make a noise dropping the sketchpad clamped under my arm, so I am holding hands firmly with a stranger I can't see, in perfect trust.

Clerics from the cathedral stand at the top of the steps. The Last Post is played. Then the silence is intense; passing traffic is irrelevant. Prayers are said after the two minutes. The circle is slow to let go hands. (And this evening, a woman tells me that one of the canons on the steps said that he'd never seen anything like it and thinks they should repeat it.)

People sit down in the circle, meditating and humming while in the centre a man blows giant bubbles.

I go to the Tent City University, a marquee where the Rev Paul Nicolson, chairman of charity Z2K, is giving a lecture on poverty and debt: 'Parliament is reducing welfare by £18 billion, hitting the poorest citizens very hard at a time of rising prices.'

Paul reflects on the two-minute silence: 'My favourite uncle, Major Oswald Segar-Owen, who'd taken me for a ride in a Bren-gun carrier at Aldershot, was shot by a sniper in Calais which was being defended to enable the escape from Dunkirk in 1940. I was eight. I also remember a very wounded German pilot who landed by parachute in our garden after his plane was shot down.

'And I remember John Lloyd, a private soldier who was a prisoner of war in Nagasaki unloading a boat when the atomic bomb was dropped. He was in the hold and the blast went over the top. He never recovered from what he saw when he got out of the boat. He used to join me for prayers for peace at Turville, my former parish. He suffered from radiation poisoning. Having had one leg amputated he refused to allow them to cut off the other one. He died long after the end of the war but suffered dreadfully for the rest of his life.'

The person who was holding my right hand turns out to be Venetia. This is her first day visiting the camp. Next Monday she starts work as a fundraiser at Unicef and in May she will have a baby.

Any hobbies? 'Upholstery - so far I've done one armchair and dining chairs. It's an old craft, tinkering away, and restoring old things is really green. I learned how to do it at the School of Stuff in Dalston.'

Jess comes up.
'Can I draw you?' I ask.
'Can't afford it,' she says.
'That's OK, I give them away.'

She usually sleeps on the streets in Stratford, East London.
'A mate told me about this place.'
'Have you made friends here?'
'Yeah.' She smiles. 'It's one big family.'

Her skin is pale and she has slept badly. 'It's cold, and there was someone playing the sax all night.'
'Didn't anyone try to stop him?'
'Yeah, but they couldn't.'

A smart woman comes up: I guess that she could be holding down a job in Paternoster Square but she turns out to be a social worker helping Jess.

I cross the road to the bus stop. Some well-fed Americans emerge from Gourmet Burger Kitchen. 'Let's go get a look at Swampy,' says one. They head for the camp, smirking.

Back outside St Paul's Cathedral

I ask Kai, a tourist from Singapore, what he thinks of the Occupy camp outside St Paul's. 'It's more moving than anything in Tate Modern. The most striking things I saw there were political comics made during Nazi Germany. Art with a message is better than art for art's sake.

'I come from a closed society built on fear. I hope something good will come out of the demonstration. I've always wanted something like that to happen in Singapore to shake people's minds a bit, to break them out of the crazy money-making cycle. But it's hard for anything to happen.'


'What would happen to demonstrators like this in Singapore?' I ask.
'Oh, they'd be put in jail. Problem solved. Let's find another victim.'

'What work do you do?'
'It's pretty evil but I'm an advertising copywriter - using words to move people.'

Kai is collecting impressions from people he meets. He hands me a tiny notebook and a pencil, and asks me to write on one page.

'I've got toothache and a cold bottom,' I write. 'I know a secret.'

I hover by a man with long ginger hair sitting by the library (open-air bookshelves), wanting to draw him, but the reek of urine from a nearby tree deters me and I withdraw.

Gillian is holding her son Atticus, named after the lawyer in To Kill a Mocking Bird. She and her husband are visiting the camp for the day, from Twickenham. 'I love it here,' says Gillian. 'The session in the university tent was all about forging a new education system. They used the example of a co-operative already set up in Lincoln. We were thrashing out what people want, and the idea is that people pay what they can afford. Teachers and students form a consensus about what should be taught. It's starting at university level but they're discussing how it can be done for tiny little ones.'

To draw them I am sitting on the chilly pavement, using a copy of The Occupied Times as insulation. A middle class man hurries by holding a child, possibly his son, by the hand. He looks down at my half-formed sketch. 'Is that good or not?' he asks rhetorically, and pulls the child along. He needs someone to give him a critical opinion. But would he seek a critical opinion of the first critical opinion? I don't mind if he thinks my picture is good or bad, or if he likes or dislikes it. But I want him to know what he thinks and likes.

I find Andi having a row with his partner about a pair of trousers during which his cigarette gets bent. He is wearing a Boris Johnson mask around his loins. 'I find Boris amusing. I think he's done a lot for the movement. It's beyond a joke. That's why I'm wearing him where I am.'

He slides the mask down from his groin and off over his jeans so that it can be nearer his face for the drawing.

'We are the highest form of consciousness. There is new evidence that we make a decision 30 seconds before we are aware of it.'

I ask how the cross came to be on his forehead.
'It was put there on Hallowe'en. I'd like to turn it into an ankh.'

A whipper-in for the next talk at the camp university approaches us: 'It's about legality and sex workers. Boris isn't invited.'

'He'd be ideal, man,' says Andi.

I say I know one of Boris's father's ex-mistresses.

Andi turns to his partner. 'Have you been to the loo for me yet?'
'No,' she says.
'I'd better do that now then.'

It's getting dark. I peer into the tech tent which is bright inside. Tangles of red electric leads are clipped on frames, like vein clusters around bones. Four young men are working intently while a generator roars.

A couple of minders are outside.
'Could I sit on the floor in the tent and draw for five minutes, please?'
'Sorry, no, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be protected in there.'

A madman has been strutting along the cathedral steps and haranguing the crowd monotonously all afternoon. At the top of the steps are two lovers disengaged from everything. I crash into their serenity to ask if I can draw them, but I can't get enough light on the paper and I lose the will to finish the sketch. The lovers are Andre, a Geordie, and Kartar, from Walthamstow.

Snug in the pub, Ye Olde London, clusters of protesters are making plans, using laptops.

Finsbury Square Occupy London protest

Finsbury Square is five star accommodation compared with St Paul's. There's plenty of space, and grass rather than cobblestones, so the campers here don't have to stick their tents down with gaffer tape.

Clem, 17, polite, cheerful, comes from Harrow. He's at college studying music in performance - guitar, keyboards, voice: 'It makes people happy.'

He gets the first, wheeziest drawing of the day.

'Do you know about Greenham Common?' I ask him.
'Yeah. The Suffragettes.'
'CND? The Aldermaston march?'
'Educate me.'
I need to leave my assumptions at the door. But there aren't any doors here.

The kitchen tent is bulging with food, much of it donated. Robert says he is 'pretty new to England': he grew up in Australia. He plays jazz guitar and is going to train to teach English as a foreign language. 'This is one of the biggest global protests ever - 980 cities worldwide are involved,' he says. 'I'm making a kind of dhal. It's got lentils, cardamom, clove, curry leaves, cumin, turmeric, no chilli as some people don't like it, ginger, garlic, onions, carrots and potatoes. And a little salt.' The camp isn't vegan though. The freegans go out to forage in the evening.

'How long are you staying?'
'Until we're forcibly evicted or we change the world, whichever comes first.'

Someone walks in. 'What's for breakfast? Smells lovely.'
'It's lunch.'
'What time is it?'
'Twelve thirty.'

Marianna, who is also working in the kitchen tent, grew up in Italy and is half French, half American. She thinks the camp is important for 'people who are not likely to join. People who don't agree and can't envisage an alternative - it gives them an idea that an alternative is possible.'


Outside, protesters are using a megaphone to address passers-by. Rhodri, who is 'working within it all', says, 'I'm not sure it'll change anything but it's a fresh opinion.' He likes gardening, the theatre, being with his family. He says that's all rather ordinary. To me he sounds content and blessed.

'Will you draw me next?' says Adele, who works at Progress Software round the corner. 'They won't change anything. They're giving it a good go though.'

Adele's colleague agrees. 'Fair play to them. It'll make no difference whatsoever. It'd be nice to think so though. I'd say keep going. Not everything happens in a day. They'll make people more aware of injustice. I don't agree with what you're doing but good on you.'

B

B, another onlooker, says, 'I'm so glad I'm not 15. The new world is starting in 2012 and it's gonna be horrible. Nostradamus said that in 2011 the economic state of the world will be down and there'll be rioting in the street. Take me now Lord! Hold on to your soul, let love grow.'

On the edge of the group of onlookers are three of the pantomime villains. 'I'm being sketched,' David says to his companions. 'Not really,' I say. 'You moved.' He moves back to where he was to allow me to carry on, but after a few seconds he says, 'We have to go now.'
'Where do you work?'
'RBS.'


Francesca has been megaphoning the pavement crowd. 'I was educated at the International School in Milan and then went to Japan with my family. I finished my masters in international development in September and now I want to learn more about the world.'

Her friend Simon is visiting the camp: 'If you're not careful your options narrow very quickly and you start to wonder how people can do anything other than academic or business jobs.' He is an American, working for the Nigerian government.

Francesca is living in a squat in Tufnell Park and works with Squash (Squatters' Action for Secure Homes). She plans a nomadic life.

'This camp started organically,' she says. 'There was a march then some people said, camp! Working groups started. Leadership doesn't necessarily mean being in charge. The kitchen and dealing with donations were the first things to be organised, it was really fluid.'

If there is a leader, I don't find anyone who claims to know, or who is bothered about not knowing.

Some snatches:

'There's no leader here but there is at St Paul's.
'Who's the leader there?'
'I don't know.'

'Will there be a third and fourth camp?'
'Someone said the South Bank and Canary Wharf but I don't know who's in that group.'

'Is anyone in charge?'
'I think it's the guy wearing the bunny ears.'

Angella-Dee says: 'I've lived on a peace camp in Cheshire. It's character building. You can live without money. I've been an anarchist all my life. They've only just caught on here.'

Greenham Common? 'I was there too. We started all these rumours that we'd dug tunnels into the RAF airbase.

'And I was at Beanfield. But you mention it now and you're talking at a blank audience. We got mashed up by the police. They smashed the shit out of us and put us all in prison. Here' - she glances at the police vans parked nearby - 'we just get looked at.'

A note for spotters: her bike is a copy of a Schwinn cruiser, given to her by a film editor who won it in a competition.

A little girl comes up to me and says: 'Do you know where my real mother is?'
Uh-oh.
But then a young woman strides over and says: 'I'm her legal guardian. Her real mother is over there.'

It spits with rain. A disembodied hand reaches out from the bottom of a tent flap and stubs out a cigarette.

Inside the first-aid tent is the quasi-religious hush of needlewomen. Three girls are stitching yellow and black letters to electric blue mesh. It's a banner which will say ALL POWER TO THE SPARKS. It's for tomorrow's demonstration of electricity workers. I crassly ask Alexa what she does 'in real life'. She says: 'This, in different contexts.'

I meet a man from Suffolk on his second visit to London: 'I looked round and thought, the buildings get that big? I don't like London. Everyone's hard apart from the people here. My wife says I go back Friday or not at all. Why don't you stay at the camp? We've just had 12 duvets donated.'

An electronic piano has appeared in the kitchen tent which is getting very jolly.

I wander along to the library, a few open-air shelves of paperbacks. Imperial Ambition by Noam Chomsky, One Day by David Nicholls, Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile by Geraint Anderson, Flying by Kate Millett (which would have been to hand at Greenham), Things Can Only Get Better by John O'Farrell.

An email of headlines comes in:
Buyout multiples rise on technology bet
Private equity takes steps towards transparency
Banks are back in takeovers

Occupy London protest outside St Paul's

I walk through St Paul's cathedral to the crypt cafe and find myself tearful for complex reasons, but the acceptance found here, the sense of freedom of worship and the freedom not to worship at all are at the heart of it.

Saskia says she felt very safe sleeping in her tent outside the cathedral last night, surrounded by others and not far from the banner saying CAPITALISM IS CRISIS. 'This is the first time I've been able to take part in the international debate,' she says. 'It wasn't possible while my daughter was growing up. And now we've got the technology. I've just been texting protesters in Hong Kong.'

A well-groomed man introduces himself as a reporter for Iranian television and asks if he may interview Saskia. She declines, as he is not clear about who and what he represents. We say we are surprised that, as a journalist, he claims not to have heard of women such as Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani who may or may not still be sentenced to death by stoning, and whose lawyer is reported to be in prison. He looks away and says that all states have their own problems. Then he smiles a lot and flatters my drawing. I ask to draw him. He declines. I am told he has been there every day of the protest. What's his brief? Out in this febrile atmosphere, is it deranged to think that he's trying to portray Britain as a dump, to discredit our comments on human rights?

Representatives of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are handing out chunks of vegan sausage on sticks. Abi (aka StopFortnumAndMasonFoieGrasCruelty) speaks on behalf of Carmen, an amiable upright pig: 'We just want people to stop and think about how corporate greed affects the way animals are treated. They are suffering every day to make people a profit.'


Tom, a hitch-hiker planning to go to Argentina, Venezuela and Alaska, intends to change his name to Marcus: 'It's a tribute to Marcus Aurelius - I admire his philosophy. I haven't thought of a decent last name yet. We're campaigning for honest jobs. Bankers get bailed out by billions of taxpayers' money. Under Cameron, people getting made redundant can't get jobs any more.' Tom/Marcus is sitting with the Anonymous section and tells me that the tents are divided into clusters of different groups - 'A united states of activism.'

A group of women with babies is gathered at the foot of the steps. Amy is breastfeeding her daughter, five-month-old Faelyn. She says: 'I brought the baby on the tube with all the commuters and there was a nappy explosion so I had a naked baby to hold up - look! Then I was blowing bubbles down the carriage.'

She is in for the long haul: 'The world is being stripped for plastic McDonald's toys which hold attention for about a second. I'm going to support this movement constantly until there is some achievement or change in the government high up. The only other option is to watch everything slowly sink.'

She is sensitive to the dangers of giving out an 'anti' message (I think of Groucho Marx singing: 'Whatever it is, I'm against it'). She says: 'We need to say what we are for. We're trying to find a positive message that explains the negative.'

Amy beams at Faelyn: 'I wish you'd sit in your pram. No, I want cuddles all of the time, mummy.'

A genial man in a grey suit says he wants to offer his support but can't identify any protesters, so I direct him to the Anonymous group nearby. The protesters are indeed rather low key and compete for space with journalists, tourists, gawpers, exhibitionists, the normal homeless population and 15 students from Middlesex University on an animation course, sent here to do street drawing.

Constable Brockwell is cheerful despite his unflattering portrait: 'The protesters would be here anyway so it's best to work in partnership.' He has had a quiet day. 'I got someone on a mobile phone, that's been the highlight.' He's referring to a motorist who will have got a £60 fine and three points on his licence. I ask Constable Brockwell what he would do if I complained about some amplified musicians who have just struck up in front of the cathedral and he points out that they are on private land.

The cathedral is losing money from visitors and cancelled events because of the protest - the takings are said to be 70% down. 'But the money isn't real,' trills a girl making posters. 'Can I borrow your pink crayon?'


Tarek is a sous-chef from Swindon. His specialities are mashed potato and bread-and-butter pudding - the secret of the latter is half single cream, half double. 'There's a revolution going on all over the world and I want to be part of it.' Tarek has been involved in the internet planning of this protest for the last month. He is German but left his home country because he found it racist.

I am cold to the bone. As a police inspector said to one of the campers: 'You don't need a fridge.'

Claire

Several muscly men from Claire's entourage help her to move house. I deal with some light stuff. Two disco balls, peacock feathers, her grandmother's musical sewing table, white Cupid wings and a retired fan-dancer's fans, folded in their long narrow box. As Claire lifts the lid they ripple expectantly.

We carry her gear down the concrete staircase of a condemned block of flats, puddled by a leaking washing machine. Shortly after the flat door is locked behind her, someone breaks in to steal the copper piping.

Claire. Writing tender or in-your-face poetry, scanning my bookshelves for Rochester, studying prosthetic and film make-up at university (amphibious humans; guillotined French aristocrats in exquisitely authentic wigs); strong, maternal, fearless; lacing her breakfast coffee with milk, honey and brandy; whipping up her prom dress at my birthday party on a South Kensington veranda to display her tattoos.

Claire is the star of a suburban weekend life-drawing house party. We all have to cross a busy road to get to the pub. Claire sticks out her bosoms to halt the traffic in both directions and like ducklings we cross safely in her wake. 'Now I know what it felt like to follow Moses,' says Rebecca.

Claire phones her grandmother in Blackpool to reassure her after the riots in London: 'I'm in the countryside and we've been sitting in the garden.' (Claire was posing outdoors while the rest of us scurried inside to fetch stoles and cardigans for ourselves.)

A conscientious hostess, I chivy the giant homing bath-spider into a plastic jug and chuck it out of the window. 'Can they fly?' says Claire.

A marquee and an acid bath

With magisterial slowness I reverse into an empty stationary car, stopping when I hear the splintering of its number plate. This prepares me for the atmosphere of fresh litigiousness on the following day: a matchmaking fair for law students looking to give their skills to charities, held at The College of Law in Bloomsbury.

When I was a student there were trailing rain-sodden skirts, foetid Afghan coats, grants, an assumption of employment. The students in this steamy marquee are sharp-eyed: experience from volunteering will help them get a job.

I'm on the fringe of Z2K, which guides vulnerable people who fall into debt and campaigns for changes to benefits law. Maev, a Z2K trustee, is running the stand with energy and grace. When she needs sandwiches or photocopies she fails to pull rank, so I make her sit down again before I go and get them.

Maev

Maev won international distinction as a telecoms lawyer - a very serious player indeed - until the sky changed: 'After I had a brain haemorrhage in 2004, I asked how much money I really needed to live on.' She now spends her time on charities, including Trinity Hospice.

After the incident with the car I am not in the best frame of mind to start a print-making course in the evening. Naked flames, nitric acid, rollers you can scrunch finger bones in. I throw a tantrum and refuse to file metal until I am given a mask and goggles. Then I fall downstairs.

Come up and see my etching - the head of a woman scribbled in the marquee today.


By the art school acid bath I note that my eye has changed while I've been drawing under the Westway: I see Rasta colours everywhere.