My favourite banner, which I grant perhaps does not show great political sophistication, undermined Blair's moral superiority in playground terms: "Blair bums Bush"

The afterglow from the march is still there. I don't like crowds. I don't like being trapped. And I don't like wheeling a buggy in a sea of people, so I deliberately stuck at the back. We still hadn't got to Hyde Park by 6pm and we missed the speeches. None of that mattered because we saw ourselves as others see us and waved at the helicopters, proud to be part of this new river running past the Ritz.

Much has been made of protest virgins. The kind of people who normally refrain from this kind of thing. In these terms, I'm an old slapper and have had all sorts of encounters over the years. So I tried to identify the shy new blood among us. Was it the two ladies with a placard saying "Muswell Hill Militant Tendency"? Was it the feisty British Asian girl shouting, "One, two, three, four - we don't want your bloody war. Two, four, six, eight - we will not negotiate"? Or was it the couple of blokes behind her grumbling, somewhat pedantically, "If you don't want a war, you have to negotiate. You can't shout things just because they rhyme"? The revolution, one anticipates, will be well-spoken. Nor have I ever ever been on a demonstration before where I heard a policeman say: "Amazing. Let's hope all this makes a difference."

These really were not your usual suspects. This was the most benign but steadfast crowd. Three arrests for minor offences out of more than a million people. That alone says something.

Everyone is trying to read what this long, slow shuffle really meant. Maybe it meant nothing other than it said on the collecting tin: "Stop the War". But it felt like more: an anger at being ignored, a refusal by all kinds of people, from veiled Muslim women to Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells, at being taken for granted by the entire political class. If I were Blair, I would be extremely worried, as sentiment against him was voiced by all and sundry. Teflon Tony has come unstuck. We moaned for ages that he didn't seem actually to believe in anything. Now he does and it's worse. This is proving a real quandary for the right-wing press which, while wishing to exploit his unpopularity, has been told by its owners Murdoch, Black et al that it must support the war. Interesting Times indeed.

My favourite banner, which I grant perhaps does not show the highest level of political sophistication, wonderfully undermined Blair's "moral superiority" in playground terms. It said simply: "Blair bums Bush."

Talking of bums, I have been vaguely thinking about potty-training my youngest. Then, in a bookshop the other day, I was quite startled to find out that this is an industry in itself. There is a book by Gina Ford that claims to tell you how to do it in a week. For those who are out of this loop, she is of the Nazi sleep-training regimes in which you black out windows as if doodlebugs were upon us, so that your baby understands absolutely the difference between day and night. (Working mothers need working babies - not ones that party all night and nap in the day.)

But why on earth does it have to be done in a week, I wonder? I may not be an expert, but most people I know appear to have been potty-trained eventually. So I find this new line of childcare advice quite sinister. One of my friends - who is a therapist and a Scandinavian - was appalled when I told her. Mind you, she thinks we shouldn't even start talking about potty-training until the baby is about 47, as far as I can see. Still, where she comes from, children don't go to school until they are six, while we shove ours into the classroom at four if we can manage it. Scandinavian children are not noticeably more stupid than ours. Here, we seem to put pressure on actual babies not to be babies any more, and then spend the rest of the time moaning about how they all grow up too quickly.

One side effect of the march was that it gave us a glimpse of what a pedestrianised city centre might be like. I'm not sure if this was all a plot by Ken Livingstone to make us more receptive to the congestion charge; but if it was, it worked.

Since becoming the NS shoe correspondent (see Back Half last week), I feel it is my duty to bring you fashion updates. I may as well be studying a troop of gibbons, so mysterious is this world to me. But someone has to, and, as a hack myself, I marvel at that skill known as "fashion journalism". From the Telegraph, for instance, exciting news of a bikini "made from the skins of freshwater salmon" for a mere £120. Don't leave home without one, I say. But my favourite, a picture caption from the Evening Standard, reads: "Betsey Johnson displays one of the key trends for autumn - the skirt."

Strangely enough, I met George Bush once in the governor's mansion in Texas. Having seen his down-home charm work the room, I have never bought the line that he is stupid: weak yes, stupid no. Linguistically, he may make John Prescott look silver-tongued, but Bush can at least get through to his people. That Blair - the great communicator - can't is surely significant.

The statesman who yields to war fever will, in Churchill's words, become a slave to "untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant fortune, ugly surprise, awful miscalculations".

I am very glad that I was but one among the many last week who may turn out to be part of Blair's awful miscalculation.

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