The legendary Neil Goodwin at the Blue Motorbike Photo-Shoot. Neil is a veteran environmentalist and documentary film-maker. He made a groundbreaking film about the infamous M11 anti-road building campaign, and another about a particular brutal confrontation between a convoy of travelling outsider "creatives" who were herded into a field by a Police corden, had their vechicles vandalised, some were even set on fire, and ended up with dozens of peaceful men, women and children being dragged from vechicles and beaten during the chaos of a Police action that lost all control.
I have seen the film and it's quite disturbing.
Neil also wrote a book charting the eviromentalist movement. I first met him when we both climbed up a crane together in 1994, at the M11 protest (well, I had nothing to do during during that summer after my 'A' levels, and was waiting to take up my place at Manchester. So, through a random quirk of fate, I found myself invited to a Summer school to studying Marxist theory, and one afternoon, a few of the student decide to investigate this environmental protest. At end of the day we were the only two left who had managed to avoid being dragged of the building site by the police and site security as they couldn't climb up the crane after us. I shall post the (unflattering) photo when it's been digitized. There is an extraordinary story about what happened next that astounds people when I tell it. It is so unusual that I may as use as a way of introducing the reader to The Manifesto as a illustrative example of the social processes invovled in creativity.
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