Bookpacking’s Blog

A plague of locusts buzzed hungrily from one shelf to the next, sucking each space dry, then moving on to see what other pickings could be greedily gobbled up. In stark stationary contrast, tired parents stood in a huge resigned line; supervising a choir of misery, their hungry babies protested their hunger and boredom as they queued for tills empty of change. On one hand Woolworths felt like a refugee camp, except it was excess that was the issue here.

In a photo negative of the darkest days of Communist Europe - when the hapless proletariat queued for hours to get into empty shops - here they queued to get out, weighed down by cut-price Christmas booty as store chain and high street institution Woolworths started its closing down sale. To the consumer victor, the spoils of retail war. The collateral damage: 30,000 shopworkers put out of work at Christmas.

You have to pity staff who have nothing to look forward to in January but job-hunting in a recession. Those under 30 may have no concept of what a recession is like, and they’re in for a shock. At least in the South East they’ll have a fighting chance to find another job, but it’ll be an anxious wait for the guys at Sunderland’s Nissan plant as the company reconsiders its viability.

The 80s were brutal in NE England. Despite TV documentaries’ 80s-shorthand consisting of 5-second clips of red-brace wearing Yuppies chugging champers under Canary Wharf, it was a grim time in many parts of the country. Recession, riots, wide-scale industrial unrest, weekly factory closures and the ever-present background threat of all-out nuclear war. By all means wear the legwarmers, but please leave the rest behind.

And yet we endure. Like the Buddhists say: “Everything arises, everything falls away.”

History casts a long shadow in Gdansk, and so we do. Bookpacking loves this kind of light and spent hours photographing the old and the new in this city. This is the old German street of Biskupia, and if you look hard enough you’ll see the odd bit of German lettering. Heading up the steep cobbles it was hard to believe it was only 10 minutes walk from the city centre.

When Gdansk was known as Danzig this area would have presumably reverberated to the sound of German not Polish, a la “Tin Drum”. Today the Polish postie stops to chew the fat with a couple of local ladies and all is tranquil in the sharp winter sunshine. The only skull and crossbones designs we see now are the ‘danger of death’ signs on the electricity junction boxes.

One thing was very clear tonight: Winston Churchill drank an inordinate amount of  booze. Whisky in the morning, champagne in the afternoon and evening, and a little brandy to top it off. Carrying on the best traditions of the eccentric upper classes, he is supposed to have supped his way through 42,000 bottles of champers. Never in the field of human boozing had so much been drunk by so few.

At Notting Hill pub The Churchill Arms they were celebrating the big man’s birthday, complete with wartime uniforms and memorabilia. An impersonator with an uncanny resemblance gave one of the speeches that Churchill delivered so effectively. The right man at the time for the job of leading Britain against the Nazis, he was actually loathed in some parts of the UK.

Bookpacking mentioned his name to an elderly relative who remembered the Depression and the General Strike of 1926. She remembered her husband walking for an hour in the dark to get to a job he hated – crawling underground in precarious 18-inch high tunnels, with the constant threat of accident or explosion.

And when Churchill ordered the troops in, to deal with Welsh miners in 1926, she remembered his instructions to send “the rats back down their holes”. He also advocated the use of poison gas against Kurds and other troublesome ‘colonials’ around 1917. So while Bookpacking enjoyed the bonhomie tonight, we were understandably reluctant to carried away toasting the man himself, rather than his (WW2) achievements.

What really stuck in our mind tonight was a minor detail: a song playing in the background. A song ignored in the hubbub of beer-fuelled banter, as khaki-clad barmen with Sam Browne belts squeezed through the throng collecting glasses; young lads who’d have been called up in 1940. A song that – despite its cheery tone – was laden with pathos. A song that might be the last one you ever heard: “Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye…not a tear but a cheer…goodbye everybody, I’ll do my best for ye.”

Ever looked at those people strolling about nonchalantly during the daytime and wondered what they get up to? Well today Bookpacking followed a few of them to the most excellent Housmans bookshop in Kings Cross.

Owned since 1959 by Peace News, the shop’s amiable manager Malcolm had organised for host MC5 legend John Sinclair to come in and plug the new book he edited, Headpress 28. If you’re a youngster like (ahem) Bookpacking, your only direct knowledge of MC5 might be the sample on the KLF’s What Time is Love: “…Right now it’s time to bring on the dance ‘Mofos’”. (For anyone not hip to the street, daddy-o, that’s a bad word and not an 18-30 holiday island). The audience was the usual mix: poets like Niall Ferguson (Rimbaud-rhapsodiser extraordinaire), aging radicals and confirmed hippies.

Rocking up proper rock ‘n’ roll late, in a quiet gravelly voice John read from the book. Some Kerouac, a polemic on the radical ethnic restructuring of New Orleans (never let a free-marketeer anywhere a blank canvas, seemed to be the message) and a poem.

As he stopped to chew the Kings Cross rain-sodden fat, the few that had real jobs – albeit with elasticated lunch breaks – went back to work, formulating as they jogged through the puddles. “A dog stole my sandwich? No, er, I had to help an old lady who was mugged? There was a bomb alert at Greggs? Nah. Aw to hell with it. I’ve just been to see a rock and roll star, Boss!”

It was party time last night for London Democrats at a packed-out Texas Embassy Cantina. Guests included Democrats Abroad activists and organisers, jubilant expats, curious Brits, and the odd MP. You’re going to be hearing more about the organisation that went into such a mass mobilisation of new and expat voters; political parties around the world will be looking at the Democrats’ model to see what they can learn. Expect a personal email from David Cameron soon.

The odd note of caution was sounded, with one experienced political animal telling Bookpacking that his Republican friends wanted Obama to win - so that at the next election they could blame the downturn and the war on him. “I know how Republicans think,” he said. “I used to be one!”

“This time must be different…” (Barak Obama)

Ironically, on the day the UK celebrates an attempt to blow up Parliament with firework displays and bonfires across the country, we watch the US elect its first black president. Truly, a red hot slice of history – with a side order of “change” to come.

Giving his reaction, Dr Robert Franklin of Morehouse College in Atlanta talked of an end to the politics of militarism and division. While Europe is certainly ready for a change in the US – particularly in its foreign and environmental policies – and there’s a mood of optimism abroad, it’s tempered by a realisation that things aren’t going to change too much. As one American told Bookpacking on the QT, “Congress makes the laws, the President only enforces them”.

But when a Republic blogger said that her bulletin board was talking of a “dark day” for the US, it kinda made Bookpacking wonder where that person has been for the last few years. And then it hit home that really, anything has to be better than what’s gone before. The US has less than 5% of the world’s population, but when they sneeze, the rest of the globe is covered in snot.

Expectation weighs heavy on the new man’s shoulders. Last week in London, Bookpacking spoke to a lifelong Labour activist who said she now loathed Tony Blair even more than right wing British icon Margaret Thatcher. In 1997 Blair’s victory song – and Bookpacking was there, blagging our way into the press enclosure – was “Things Can Only Get Better”. How much better things can get, in a country with as much potential as the US, remains to be seen.

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.

It’s difficult to imagine that Prenzlauerberg was ever anything but a playground for the stylish young professionals of Berlin. Boutique shops sell the latest retro sportswear look for local hipsters, while tattooed 20-somethings brush the pavement outside low key bars that will later be filled with creative and media types sipping on premium beers. Yummy mummies drop into the local bakery for some of that richly fibrous bread that Germans adore and which makes them turn their noses up at anaemic British breakfast offerings.

There are kids everywhere in what was recently declared one of the most fertile spots in Europe; the ratio of children to adults shot up as it became the place to settle with your firstborn when suburbia is a wrench too far for the still young parent who has yet to leave books, bars and me-time behind. And it is very civilised. Having dodged HGV’s in London’s erratic and intermittent cycle lanes, it’s a sight to behold these phalanxes of mothers – and the odd father – sedately crossing the boulevards on dedicated cycle paths with their own set of signals. You know for a fact that everything is recycled here.

And the art! The walls are a living canvas. Ironic exchanges of postcommunist banter: “Capitalism sucks” then the answering “Communism sucks” mix with the latest in stencil art. Huge dayglow pink letters on flyposters seem to challenge you to a fight as they announce “F*** Amerika”. Dark stone buildings from another age have their gravitas subverted with rampant spray can colours and a plethora of pop art posters.

But these contradictions run deeper than the imposition of 21st Century culture onto pre-war buildings, where parents obliviously push their single child under a sign for a club which shouts “B*stard”. When I told a German girl I was going to visit my friend on Kastanienallee (Chestnut Tree Avenue) she immediately said: “Well she’s not from the East then, if she lives there”. She smiled as she said it, but with that trace of a raised eyebrow that accompanies a point being made.

And indeed, my friend isn’t. She’s an academic who moved to Berlin and did reasonably well for herself, and so moved to the steadily-gentrifying Prenzlauerberg to enjoy the fruits of her labour, in every sense. This was my first inkling, as someone new to Germany, that ‘unification’ is a small word for a long drawn out and incomplete process.

The area aroud Schonhauser Allee is the setting for the hilarious vignettes recounted in Vladimir Kaminer’s book Russian Disko. Just like my first time in Prague in ‘97, I had missed by a mile the early wave that the Zeitgeist-chasers spotted years ago, and I pondered how much the area had changed and the disappearance of that naïve sense of freedom that must have followed Die Mauerfall.

But the done-and-dusted appearance of that era’s history belies rifts and the baggage of unfinished business. History is not comprised of discrete boxes that slot neatly next to each other in the academic’s bookcase, but instead of thousands of strands which overlap like a bowl of spaghetti. On one side of the street, a crane, probably engaged in building a cool apartment block for more cool people who want to live in a cool neighbourhood where they can cycle to work and drink coffee in the morning with similarly fashionable friends.

But on the other side of the road is a huge piece of graffiti which some enterprising individuals have managed to put on the side of a 5-storey high building. apartment block despite it being around five storeys high. “Diese stadt ist Aufgekauft!!!”. Something about the size and font instantly tells you this is not some tagging rubbish from juveniles, but a protest. It says: “This state is bought”.

Just down from the street, past an army surplus store with a suitably sinister fighter pilot’s helmet in the window – black and red-starred – is White Trash Fast Food. Here, check-shirted German rockabilly staff serve burgers in a Chinese-themed room to an international crowd who lap up country tributes from visiting American retro bands.

But over the road, and a little more discreet, is the legendary Kaffee Burger. One of the great things about Berlin – in a city where so many are single and so many are disenchanted with the meat and two veg’ daily fare of more ‘vanilla’ capitals where they couldn’t find what they were looking for – is that you can go out alone to a bar or café like this and not feel awkward.

As midnight approaches and it starts to fill up, I’m relaxing at the bar when I get talking to Wolfgang and his girlfriend. A native, like many others, he has been priced out by the ‘yuppy invasion’. “I live further out now, in Wedding. A lot of people live out there, artists and musicians, because we can’t afford it here in Prenzlauerberg. Foreign investors are buying apartments and then they push up the rents so the locals can’t afford it.”

It’s a familiar story, from Shoreditch to Barcelona – gentrification causing dislocation. The uneven spread of prosperity which is capitalism, carving up a previously static population and diluting the local identity with outsiders.

And there are strong differences. I had come to Kaffee Burger to hear some open-mic German poetry. I don’t speak the language, but it’s possible to appreciate the rhythm and I wanted to see what it was like. You’re always guaranteed an interesting crowd too. One particular poem was drawing a lot of response from the crowd, and I could tell by the tone that something or someone was being mocked.

Asking someone on the periphery, they told me that the politician Wolfgang Bohmer was getting it in the neck for his dig at the folk of the former-DDR. That week he had been in the news, after allegedly saying that Godlessness had encouraged a cavalier attitude to abortion and even infanticide. Statistics had struck again, but no-one wanted to hear any conclusions.

Needless to say, this touched a nerve and many of these east of the former divide were incensed. It suggested a primitive populace who have still not caught up with their western brothers, despite millions of marks poured into their ailing infrastructure by a victorious west – an investment resented by some on the ‘winning’ side. I tried asking a few mothers on Kastanienallee what they thought, but they said hadn’t been following the news – and they would have been Wessis anyway, living in the protective bubble that money provides.

Just like the tv tower which looks down on so much of East Berlin, the present is  ambiguous. Shades of grey replace the black and white clarity of the polarised past. On the one hand, this shiny space rocket is symbolic of an energetic and arty city which draws people from all over the world; a European version of San Francisco, a playground where you can reinvent yourself. On the other, it’s a reminder of recent revolution and of a scarred pysche.