Tahrir Square

After two hours sleep, I headed down to the hotel breakfast room to meet a colleague. It was surreal. From the emptiness of last night, the cafe was packed: with journalists. I eavesdropped on a conversation about a correspondent who had been roughed up by some plain clothes security a night or two before at Tahrir Square, at the heart of the protests.

So when my colleague told me he was going down to the square that day, my heart skipped a beat. Two Irish reporters from RTE had secured a car and driver, and it was “safety in numbers at least”. As we headed out of the hotel, we met a Spanish woman for Moroccan radio and the five of us squeezed (and I mean squeezed) into the driver's compact car. He drove us though the back streets, avoiding checkpoints, he told us, but later, when I walked from the square back to the hotel, I realised just how badly he had ripped us off. The streets were still empty – trees and branches blocked the roads , but we were stopped only once by the army who checked our passports and apologised for doing so.

We planned to be there only an hour. I thought it was all my heart would be able to take. But I ended up going home about five hours later, my notebook full of quotes from women whose passion and commitment was inspiring and addictive. By the time I left, many hundreds more were queuing in the drizzling rain, chanting “Out, Out Mubarak. We want in”.

I spoke to university students, doctors, teachers .. women in their 20s, 30s, 40s. All told me: "We want free elections, we want a Parliament, we want a better life!”

It was hard not to get caught up in the atmosphere. People sat on the ground painting protest pictures, painting on the cement ground. Hoisting their children on their shoulders, they waved Egyptian flags, they prayed, they laughed and they debated … so many discussions about the future, about politics. As I sat on a step making sense of my notes I was handed a raisin pastry and a cup of black, sweet, hot tea. When I tried to give the guy some money, he laughed and shook his head. A free clinic was set up for those who had been injured. And everywhere you looked there were people with bandages on their heads, eyes, with broken legs or arms from where they had been injured Thursday and Friday when the thugs on horses and camels poured in.

One 72-year old man told me he had seen with his own eyes (?) that the thugs had been given money, between 50 and 300 Egyptian pounds ($8-$50) and food, to attack the activists inside the square. “Why do they do this?” he told me, struggling to make me understand what was needed. He drew on my notebook a hierarchical drawing of Mubarak at the head of a connected state apparatus, the army, the police, the Interior ministry. Then he drew an X over Mubarak, and said all the others would fall too.

On stage, a six year old girl led the chants against Mubarak. A woman stood up next and said she was a doctor in a hospital in Mubarak's home town. “We have no medicine, no IVs, how can Mubarak care about the country when he doesn't even care about his home town.”

A farmer then took the microphone and spoke about how the soil used to be healthy, but now, Mubarak had allowed his cronies to build on the land. "We cannot grow food, the people are hungry, but Mubarak is making money.”

The crowd shouted their empathy.

No one believes that the concessions Mubarak has made, announcing that neither he nor his son will stand for president are worth considering. “We have heard so many promises from Mubarak, why should we believe him now?” one woman told me.

“We want a transitional government. We want free elections. We want a better life. We deserve a better life."

But there also isn't any single character they want to lead a transitional government. Most are lukewarm about Mohammed ElBaradei, the former head of UN weapons inspections, and Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League who joined the protesters on Friday.

I was interested in what had given the protesters this unshakable belief that if they stay, Mubarak will eventually leave. Back in 2008, the protesters came out on to the streets in support of labour unions. Like now, it was organised by bloggers and through Facebook. But they fizzled out when the state started rounding up the Internet protesters. This time, there are thousands more and they are unrelenting in their protests.  "Tunisia of course was a spark. People now see that protesting can bring change, " a researcher at a think tank told me. "But also we are fed up. We want change.  This is a revolution."

The government is still trying to make it difficult for journalists.

Organisers were asking for press passes. None of us had brought ours fearing they could be used to identify us as journalists if we were stopped, and I had thrown all of my business cards away in the Abu Dhabi airport toilet. When asked why they had changed the rules, one organiser said it was a new request by the military because many infiltrators from foreign countries were acting as spies for other countries.

I asked if they thought that about British passport holders. Come on, Britain doesn't need spies here.

“Remember when Mossad used British and American passports to kill that Hamas leader in the UAE, that's what they think is happening here,” the organiser told me.

Inside, a plain clothes policeman approached me. I know he was a secret policeman because he was clean, well dressed and his hair was combed."Is any one arresting you, intimidating you, kidnapping you?" he asked me as I sat on a step, my notebook out and chatting to a university student. "No," I said, somewhat bewildered by where this was going. "Well, make sure you write about that!" And then he was gone.