UP THE SYCAMORE TREE Not anymore we're not. UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: 13.march.99. Birds are singing, buds are flowering in what looks like an incredibly early English spring. Resting our hope on the sun we hoped the camp would last until summer. But no. At noon last week hundreds of riot policeman well borged-up stormed through Crystal Palace. An elicopter repeating their mantra: "you are being evicted - resistance is futile". The siege had begun. 3 days of them looking up at us. 3 days of us looking down at them tearing up anything at ground level. Then the climbers came in absailing down from cherry pickers. We've been assimilated. Ten days after and a few people are still locked up in an underground bunker, tunnellers slowly working their way through. Time to learn from our mistakes. And move on to the next development. last month we hopefully worte... Theory can't be separated from practice. Following the NPU appeal to stop building altogether, I looked around for practical ways to implement our resolution. Crystal Palace protest camp is what I found: a bunch of people that since a year have been squatting trees in a park threatened by 'development' in order to slow down the works and sore up the costs for evil developers. The nasty idea is to build a multiplex cinema completed with 2000 car parking spaces. An ugly square of concrete and glass dedicated to showing American blockbusters to pop corn eating teenagers. Bollocks to that. 'A va avanti me na barca ntil bosc'(it goes forward like a boat in a wood) old piedmontese proverbs come to mind as I climb a split sycamore to pull up my first beam. The job is slow as fear of height and wicked swaying in the wind make me seasick. I don't trust these bits of wood found in skips precariously tied to some branches no bigger than my leg. It looks like they're going to come apart any minute. After a week it start dawning on me that maybe those rope are real strong after all and that the platform won't fall down. Confident I start building a bender on top and a front landing bit. The platform is shaped like a boat with the front sticking out of the tree. A bicycle wheel allows fantastic steering in the wind. Settling in on top of my sycamore I observe how the camp organically evolved on top of a rubbish dump. Trees have been squatted and path naturally cut through overgrowth and piles of building waste. Computers are rolling fast out of my mind for now. Don't know when my next update will be. NPU NEW WEB ADDRESS Following the closure of altern.org, the best free server around we had to move the site to a new address. Altern was closed following a sentence of the Court d'Appel of Paris which held its owner responsible for the content of one of the sites he hosted. Estelle Halliday sylicon tits picture are at the bottom of this very serious manouvre on free servers. Altern hosted over 30000 sites and, after being held legally responsible for their content, the administrator had no choice but to close them all. Our solidarity to the administrator. Details of the case + petition and help infos on altern site: altern.org/bureau NOTTINGHAM KAPUT MUNDI