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Bookpacking
As someone who often meets people at London’s Heathrow, Bookpacking can testify that it’s often a long wait. From plane to door, an hour is a typical time. 90 mins is not unusual. Often, if your guests are in the non-EU queue at the UK border, it’s passport control where a lot of time is lost.
But luggage can be slow too. As the BBC News reported this lunchtime, a new tunnel being built at Heathrow aims to cut intra-terminal delivery time. Hopefully it’ll be ready – along with a whole lot of creaking London infrastructure – for 2012.
And, again hopefully, it won’t open with the same debacle as T5 when the national carrier was left with egg on its flag.
What this actually means for customers is hard to say, because the practical implications weren’t actually spelled out. Given that you collect your bags in the same terminal you arrive in, surely it only affects those who are transferring flights? Presumably, if bags can take an hour at the moment to cross between terminals, then some of the millions of bags which are “lost”every year must be not lost but late – missing their connection and failing to follow their owners.
The end result is the same, but this is vague reporting inspired by a press release; it fails to anticipate an obvious viewer question. It follows on from yesterday’s report on the same programme that London buses are failing mothers with pushchairs. There was no mention of the size increases which see some buggies resemble quad bikes, or of the fact that in the capital nobody has any space on London’s packed-out transport. As a regular bus user, Bookpacking boggles at where this extra pram capacity might come from? Less seats for the elderly & disabled maybe?
Of course, baggage is a thankless task. And, like the mail, the general public has no interest in vast logistics operations or the small daily successes that go unreported. So the PR at LHR should be careful not to promise too much. Because when the new tunnel opens, an impatient world will be watching.
Glancing at the news on Germany’s English-speaking The Local, we came across this interesting opinion piece. Recently, arsonists caused huge damage to a military base in Dresden and Berlin is gearing up for the annual May Day riots. So as anarchists spray acid in bars and destroy cars in East Berlin, and local bohemians start to rethink just how edgy they like their cool, is Germany on the edge of mass unrest?
The writer thinks not. But as Bookpacking has previously mentioned, things are bubbling on the continent. One only has to look at all the banners on display outside French universities, or attempt to access the Eiffel Tower on a public holiday to see that there’s a steady simmer of discontent as the economy bites and purse strings tighten. Some French employees have even resorted to ‘kidnapping’ their bosses. This generally involves barricading them in their office, rather than bundling them into a car boot.
Reading on The Local that a “socialist firebrand” had called for similar activity in Germany, Bookpacking thought this was perhaps a little tactless: over there ‘abducting industrialists’ brings to mind the infamous fate of the kidnapped boss Hanns-Martin Schleyer. His body was dumped in a French wood on 19 Oct 1977 by the Baader-Meinhof gang as they waged war on the (then West German) establishment. It may be 32 years ago, but it still exercises a hold on the nation’s imagination. As a whole heap of anniversaries roll around in 2009 including WW2, the Weimar Republic and the Berlin Wall’s demise it promises to be an interesting year.
What does it mean to be English? Is it the polyester football shirts, lager and kebabs of the busy high street? Is it John Major’s gentle thwack of leather on willow and warm ale on quiet village greens? Or is it Brick Lane’s curry houses and urban cool?
Is it the stoical clipped tones of the senior civil servant on the 07.17 to Euston, or the extravagant effing and blinding of the bare-chested brickie barreling through Brum in a banger?
Whatever it is – and there is a lot of debate over the success of the ‘multicultural experiment’ – let’s celebrate it today. Without straying into jingoism or nationalism, let’s salute the flag and be proud of where we’re from.
And while we’re at it, let’s tip our metaphorical hat to the world’s most famous playwright who died on the same day. And he is famous the world over. Bookpacking recently asked some South Americans if they had heard of William Shakespeare. We though we were being careful not to be Euro-centric and make cultural assumptions. But they looked at Bookpacking with an expression of hurt, saying something along the lines of “Of course! Do you think we’re from Mars or something?”
We won’t make that mistake again.
In ultra-runner Haruki Murakami’s book What I Think About When I’m Running, the author makes a clear connection with running and writing. Running can be a meditation, and while we might switch off on the surface, the subconscious is often whirring away underneath.
Like a diligent PA, while we take 40 winks on our office sofa, it’s busily sorting things and putting together internal presentations to impress us when we wake up. Running can be something to write about itself but it can also be a way to facilitate creativity and to establish the routine that can make the difference between just coming up with an idea, and actually executing it.
As running becomes more and more popular, so we can expect more books on the subject. Tonight at (London) Victoria’s Run and Become, writer Chris McDougall gave us a little insight into a book which is another variation on the ‘quest’ theme. In Born to Run, this injury-prone author was trying to find a way to stay out of the doctor’s surgery. His search brought him into contact with an obscure tribe of Indians in Mexico who run miles and miles every day, never giving it a second thought, yet are party-hard beer monsters.
And did he find what he was looking for? Bookpacking was sorely tempted during the Q&A to ask him to read out the last page. But wisely, he left us wanting more. Hitting the park the next evening for a run, Bookpacking’s own subconscious put a busy week’s input in the mix. Some 40 minutes later, the results spewed forth. And – taking our inspiration from one of those Indian runners we’d heard so much about – we concluded that when we got back home, we too would chug a beer in record time.
This week we’ve been drawing towards the end of the brilliant Stasiland. Some things in life are so subtle and insidious in the way they wreak their destruction, that it’s hard to convey the level of harm they do without sounding histrionic. But Anna Funder’s work steadily plots the low-key psychological violence that lay behind the Stasi’s bid to control every aspect of the DDR citizen’s life. Why draw attention to your organisation’s existence with a high profile execution when, using your network of coerced informants, you can quietly engineer a nervous breakdown for your target?
Many never found out that it was not life conspiring against them, but the state. It is this power, pulling invisible strings and playing God, that gives a stalker their thrill. Being in the secret police rewarded you for taking the path of least resistance and following your more base instincts. In a country of empty shelves, power was the only way to really feel one-up on your supposedly equal peers. And there were perks; if you were going to be thorough in your monitoring, then you had to listen to everything the target did. Who knows what you might hear through pillow talk?
Of course everybody knew the Stasi were everywhere, but doublethink was a key part of the denial and backwards-rationalisation that enabled the regime to exist. Many of the agents of the system knew what they were doing was ridiculous, but in that Emperor’s New Clothes culture the shops were full and everyone was happy, if the Party said so.
Listening to people in the former Eastern Bloc lament the passing of an era where ‘you knew where you were’, you could lull yourself into a 6th form common room rose-tinted view of communism. God only knows – or rather He doesn’t because He didn’t officially exist behind the Iron Curtain – that communism looks good on paper. But reading the intensely personal accounts of state persecution that Funder recorded, one becomes increasingly incredulous at such extreme cynicism; in a culture of suspicion where it seems flippant to apply that overused adjective ‘Kafka-esque’.
The subject – and there were many given there was a Stasi employee for at least every 10 people – was presumed guilty until proven guilty. With a relentless drip of propaganda and the steady application of duress, the authorities corroded the individual’s integrity and morality. They undermined the most basic bonds of humanity in a whole society, to prop up a worldview they only half-believed themselves. Like a twisted pyramid scheme, a citizen who was under suspicion could make it easy on themselves by informing on another suspect, who was informing on someone else who was spying on somone else…
The Nazi war machine, with its industrial might, used the direct route: bullets. But with the DDR’s threadbare infrastructure and austere economy, and the need to create jobs to maintain full employment, it suited the Nazis’ successors to maintain this huge and hidden army of grey men to slowly drain the life out of the individual. They called themselves the Sword and the Shield of the Party but, in a twist on the description sometimes applied to Prussia (and coincidentally the geographical boundaries overlap), this was not a state with a secret police force; but a secret police force with a state.
It’s fascinating, if slightly wearing for anyone with any capacity for empathy. One’s rising incredulity is inversely proportional to the characters’ dwindling reservoirs of self-belief; slowly ebbing away as a ‘template for undermining’ takes its toll. They certainly killed people, using locations in Leipzig and Dresden for secret executions, and Putin was allegedly stationed in Dresden as the local KGB presence. But for the majority of their victims, they preferred to wear them down until they became a shell of their former selves. And if you finally accepted you never going to make it to the West, it was tempting to retreat instead into your own mind. This withdrawl from daily life even had a name, ‘internal emigration’. Some might say that was the biggest crime of all. Not the killing of hundreds, but the burying of Hope for millions.
This is not the fate that awaits London’s banking fraternity should the economy worsen (is it?) but a super spot on the Thames to watch the river flow and remember that we are but a blip in the grand scheme of things. Historic boozer the Prospect of Whitby takes its name from a ship that used to moor nearby, and had a famous – or rather infamous – clientele. The Hanging Judge George Jeffreys was a regular; it’s sometimes said that cops and villains have more in common than either would like to admit.
The guest ales reflected the fast approaching St George’s Day, and supping a pint of England’s Glory, our thoughts turned to a North Yorkshire lad who would have known the river well. One of Britain’s premier navigators came from a humble background on the colliers that shuttled up and down the east coast bringing coal from the North East to London: the legendary Captain James Cook (BTW, anyone ever made the connection with Star Trek? For “USS Enterprise” read “HMS Endeavour”; for James Kirk read James Cook).
Author Herman Hesse uses a river as a metaphor of timelessness in the cult work Siddhartha. And there’s something very soothing about being near water. Looking at the Thames and remembering that some 2,000 years ago people were going about their business in more or less the same spot, it’s a great way to eat a little humble pie and get back a little perspective in this hectic city of inflated salaries and egos.
The warehouses along here may now be tiny overpriced flats – supply and demand will get you every time in London town – but it’s not hard to imagine trading ships from all over the world tied up; many of them coming from lands where the sun never set, that pink third of the mapped world that denoted the British Empire.
One can picture Conrad watching a mysterious vessel bob gently, and a little light bulb going off as he tried to figure out which obscure and exotic location it had come from. Or Dickens, on one of his many perambulations, surveying the comings and goings like some sort of self-appointed overseer.
And the river is still busy today. Catamaran clippers to and fro at a heady rate of knots, passing the slower sightseeing boats, as commuters escape to Greenwich. But even these sleek new machines are humbled as tourists bounce past them in a RIB (rigid inflatable boat), slewing across their bows: hard a-port in a G-force inducing semi-circle. We come and go; but like Hesse said, the river flows on.
What do we think of usually when we think of Paris? Skipping along the boulevards en route to a tantalising tryst or a literary lunch? Coveting a coffee while peoplewatching from a fashionable cafe’s terrasse?
Well the big talking point this week in Paris has not been the latest rehashing of Descartes and his contribution to the foundations of modern thought, but the leaking of CCTV pictures from a Parisian night bus. It shows a man on his own being beaten up by a group of young men on a Noctilien service. Not a rare event in a big city you might think, but giving it extra spice and spurring much debate is a racial element; the victim was white while his attackers (or most of them) weren’t. Furthemore the verbal abuse they added to the kicking they gave him suggested they were not ethnically French.
Given that certain suburban housing projects of Paris flare up on a fairly regular basis (as portrayed in the film La Haine) a banlieu-backlash is unsurprising. This incident plays into the hands of the extreme right, and interviewed in Le Figaro the victim said he did not want to become a cause-celebre for those who would make political capital from his bad fortune.
A policeman was reported suspended for leaking the CCTV pictures, and a quick search of YouTube found a video which claimed the footage had been removed from YouTube, giving a link instead to an equivalent Russian site. The video claimed governmental interference, but while playing down racial tensions might be one of the motives behind the footage’s removal, its distribution certainly constituted a violation of the victim’s privacy.
Having just returned from Paris in a work capacity, and having had two clients pickpocketed, Bookpacking can testify that – like London – Paris has its dark side.
Yesterday evening found Bookpacking playing with a new toy in the woodland of Wimbledon Common. Sometimes the simplest of things can bring hours of enjoyment, and for £4 or so, we bought a sturdy looking compass from the local Aladaddin’s Cave that is Lidl, and headed off into the bush. The little boy inside takes very little prompting to appear, and with our new low-tech gadget, childhood memories came rushing back of family camping holidays with mysterious forests that had to be explored and hills that had to be conquered.
As people look for cheaper leisure activities – eg not buying a few rounds in a pub and waving goodbye to £50 in a couple of happily hazy hours – Bookpacking is predicting an upswing in activities like hiking and camping. Already surfing a festival wave, more and more people are discovering the joys of life under canvas. There’s nothing like that first cup of tea (remember the slogan: “Tea; best drink of the day”?). Especially when you’ve faffed on for a half-hour to make it – this the very definition of deferred gratification.
And the great outdoors is, well, great. Last night, surrounded by birdsong and devoid of people, it was hard to believe this was Zone 3, well inside the M25. If travel is often about escape, maybe we don’t always need to spend a huge amount on airfares to find such solicitous solitude if we look harder at home.
And best of all, some sharp compass work brought us right to the final waypoint of the evening, the Fox & Grapes. A cute pint (served only a few degrees below room temperature), we aren’t being obtuse when we say this angle is our favourite segment of the hiking experience; the very apex of this little Boys Own adventure.*
Hi-Tec walking boots from £40; Karrimor boots similar at Field & Trek sale; compass £4 Lidl; OS map typically £7; Berghaus waterproof from £50 online, or c. £150 for Gore-Tex lined; walking trousers c. £30 from Blacks.
* apologies, but what’s the point in having your own blog if you can’t insert the occasional awful pun?
Every cloud has a silver lining, and for the ever-frugal Bookpacking that means that there are some cracking deals to be found as the overextended find themselves making new holes in those ever-tightening belts, and even the well-placed cut their outgoings as they monitor the uncertain economy.
Sipping a delicious 80p cup of “Flat Broke” (8 oz. of filter topped with hot milk, doncha know) in Brick Lane Coffee, we might use that caffeine to suppress our appetite for a few hours. But even then, Marks and Spencer are at hand to offer the £2 meal deal (sandwich, drink, crisps).
And falling upon a couple of hidden-gem hostelries amongst the mews of Marylebone, we were reminded that Samuel Smith’s pubs are more common than you might think in central London. They are uniformly cheap; £1.88 for a delicious pint of bitter? Now that’s t’ good Yorkshire thrift lad.