Bookpacking’s Blog

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.

…AKA there’s no time like the past….

Spotted this week in Paris, in the English-language publication “FUSAC”:

Wanted: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. Write to 35483@fusac.org. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed.
I have done this only once before.

So, what are you waiting for?

One of the delights of the Berlin is just wandering the streets. Today it’s Friedrichshain, which is quashed between Karl Marx Allee and the Spree river and one of many sub-centres of this diffuse city. Berlin feels like an ever-shifting urban canvas, and leaving the new style bars behind in the avenues, we find esoteric treasure in the side streets and alleyways.

Like a plane crash survivor, Berlin is city embraces the now and all the possibilities of existence that brings, yet can never escape the memory of its trauma. Pasted on a garage wall, a riot of CMYK announces another rendezvous of the colourful-but-cool in a venue which will enjoy its moment in the sun, before returning to the tumbledown obscurity from whence it came. This is the city of the Geheimtip, the nod and the wink about a bar, cellar or even someone’s front room which is temporarily the focus of the fickle and fashionable.

But underneath the posters, where yet another team of spray painters have left their mark, a mural depicts a Zeppelin. Immediately recognisable, its shape speaks of a dark past but is somehow softened by a loss of edge that the passage of time gives to memories that cut less deeply the further back they are. From the pre-Hitler era, before Friedrichshain was renamed Horst Wessel Stadt in honour of the Nazi anthem writer, it belongs to a conflict that is less offensive than its successor.

Across the street is a yard full of Volkswagen T25 camper vans. Appropriately VW’s spiritual home Wolfsburg is a short drive to the west. Two African men load a lorry with parts, before approaching us to see what we’re staring at. The vans are not for sale but only for export they tell us. Import/export: the people involved in this business never seem to welcome scrutiny. Presumably, given Berlin’s low costs and the popularity of these vans abroad, they’re being sold overseas. “Das ist Kultauto” we manage to say – a cult car. Unimpressed but satisified we pose no threat, they amble away. Berlin is one of those places where you can sense things happening underground, in hidden places. For good and bad.

Turning another corner onto Modersohnstrasse, one of the many open spaces you find in Berlin (bomb damage or communist lack of care?) is gated with a sign which appears to announce something defiantly to the world. Inside, it is packed with a collection of those distinctive two-axle  trailers that you only see in this part of the world. Like the T25, they have a certain boxiness; but unlike the camper vans in the yard, there are heat shimmers denoting working stoves – they are occupied. A gypsy encampment? A travelling circus? An artistic paradise? We’re seized with a need to know.Then a paramilitary figure, clad all in black, emerges on one of those sit-up-and-beg bikes that are fantastic for stately patrols of the flat Berlin cyclepaths, but would be useless in London. He stops to adjust his phone; such an opportunity is not to be wasted.

His clothes are actually Carhartt rather than military fatigues, the only war he is fighting is the annual one against the bitter Berlin cold. This, he tells us, is a community of squatters. Rather than travellers, they are stay-putters who spied an opportunity in this empty patch of land and took it. Our pragmatic new friend tells us how it is: “This land was empty so we decided to squat. The government said ‘Ok, no problem, we don’t need this right now so you can have it. But when we are ready to build our sports development, you will have to move on.’ But, this is Berlin, so they have no money, so they cannot build it and we are still here.” Ah this city, such a cheap date for the decadent but destitute. “If you look carefully,” a friend once said, “you’ll notice people nursing the same beer for a long time.”

But being Berlin, this cosmopolitan community of squatters are very much in touch with the modern world.  “She works in IT,” he says as woman in a hooded top and baggy jeans slouches past, “So we have very fast internet. Another guy is a businessman and he owns several companies.” Anarchists, alternatives, entrepreneurs and IT specialists – all living cheek by jowl in this soon-to-be-gentrified quarter. But how long can this coexistence last, as capitalism spreads its polarising wealth and business also spies an opportunity. Are the anti-yuppy car burners of Friedrichshain fighting a losing battle?

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.