The V-Boys!

You may have heard that the Pro-Democracy Rally was "marred by violence".  It's in all the papers, but I was there and I know that's not what I saw.

The newspaper photos of the violence are all the 'V for Vendetta' boys, the Red Shirts and the police, with one cute little camera-boy deep in the fray getting an elbow in the face, his pink-framed glasses flying through the air.

I met the V for Vendetta Boys:

This was early in the March and they were total honeys.  

They told me they were protesting Donald Tsang's Democracy Reform Package (wherein we get to ALSO vote for a one of Beijing's choices of geographic representatives.)

But then I stopped for a while to take photos from the overpass, and bumped into them again about 20 minutes later:

No idea what happened but since I'd last seen them, but now they were "ready to go the strop" as they say in Australia.  Really irked, anyway!

And you know how you sometimes look through your photos and think "Damn, if only I'd shot that one several inches to the side"?  Well, just as I was leaving, my last shot of them is this one:

See that there on the right?  That's a man in a red T-shirt!  I have no recollection if there were more of them, and I left just then ... but after seeing it all in the papers I'm now thinking I left only minutes before the fighting started.

Let me go through my photos again and see if I have image of the boy in the pink-framed glasses?

Nope, not a single shot.  He definitely isn't part of this group.  The poor honey was obviously just in the wrong place at the wrong time, filming!

Anyway, all this much-vaunted violence at this march, and I didn't see a second of it.  Although I did hear a great many vuvuzelas and that was enough of an assault for my taste.

Whoever brought these sodding things back from South Africa's World Cup should be taken out and spanked soundly.  And that would be violence I totally approve of!