Bookpacking’s Blog

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.

On this day in 1978 the secret life ex-Baader-Meinhof member Astrid Proll was leading, in London’s leafy West Hampstead, came to an end. On a typical suburban street, Special Branch came to take away an atypical woman: an urban guerilla who had lived a dramatic life outside the margins and now taught teenagers how to fix cars.

Bearing in mind this was the Britain of the 1970s, one can only imagine the metaphorical balls it took to work in an environment like that. From stealing and driving getaway cars, to the sensory deprivation in an isolation cell that would drive Ulrike Meinhof to suicide; to working with disadvantaged youngsters in a country where people were still fixated on WW2 – it was a life less ordinary.

Interestingly, for someone who had fought the state at home, she found herself teaching as part of a government training scheme in Britain. Bookpacking was lucky enough to speak to someone who had befriended Proll and was there when the police arrived. Vilified at home, this lady had nothing but kind words for her here. It’s a story full of contradictions and shades of grey.

The forthcoming film The Baader-Meinhof Complex will dig all this up again, and there is talk of the place in the national psyche that the German Autumn holds in the national psyche. But when Bookpacking read contemporary reports in the London newspapers it really did seem like a different world. Perhaps history is more ‘done and dusted’ in some countries, especially ones that feel they can laud their recent past. While others struggle to come to turns with what is another tear in a barely closed wound.