Reflections of Hands over the Forth

HANDS OVER OUR FORTH by Daphne and Zella Paterson age 8

We woke up early and made our banners. They said “Solar Power, Wind Power, People Power”. Unfortunately mum spelled Power wrong on one of them. We got on the wrong bus with lots of people but then we got off and walked over to the other bus. The bus was full and we were with mum and dad and Sandra.

It took a long time to get to Edinburgh.

When we got off the bus, it was lovely and sunny. We had to wait a few minutes because people weren’t ready yet. While we waited, we saw a kestrel looking for some prey, but it was distracted so many times. For instance, once a crow tried to interfere. It was distracting it so the kestrel had to give up the prey and fight the crow. The two birds went away, close to the Forth bridge and did a few tricks like loop de loops, and then the kestrel finally shook off the crow and went back to hunting. Then magpies came and bothered the poor kestrel even more!

Then we got together for photo shoots. Some people had big banners and they were singing “No U.C.G. in Scotland”. There were lots of people so I went to the front to see better. A man asked mum’s permission to take our photo, he was from the Edinburgh Evening News. I wrapped my banner around me. 

It was a lovely surprise when we met Adam and Lucas who are our Quaker friends. We didn’t know they were going to be there.

We ran ahead up the bridge to get good views and to get our freedom from the grownups. These are some of the things we saw: 

We saw 2 people wearing Muppet helmets on a big motorbike. One had a blue Muppet head with the blue Saltire, and the other had a pink Saltire - they were both really fluffy! Then they drove across the bridge and hooted and we all waved which made me feel pumped!

We saw two little dogs wearing jumpers saying FRACK OFF and I pointed this out to Adam and he said it was a good joke.

We saw a huge container ship, it went underneath us and it hooted which was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious ;)

We walked right up to the middle of the bridge with thousands of people. There was a drone flying up and down to take videos of us. We waved at the drone.Then we all held hands and shouted but we had to let go hands when it was time to eat our sandwiches. 

There was a very good piper.

We were protesting because other countries like Australia are really suffering from fracking and these other ways of getting gas. We don’t want it to start in Scotland, we would rather use solar power and wind.  

That is what happened on Saturday 11th of October 2015!!

P.S. A big thank you to all the people that organised this great day!!!!! : ]