Me and The Lancet

Seems amazing that I had this published all those years ago, given my own history with drink, and the subject matter of other pieces on this blogspot, such as this and this. Was certainly one of my proudest moments at the time to have the article appear in such a prestigious journal.

Birmingham Back on the Map: Peaky Blinders

No Brummie with a heart could be failed to be moved by BBC 2’s recent six-part drama ‘Peaky Blinders’. Others from outside Birmingham have poured a certain amount of scorn on the apparent inauthenticiy of the accents, despite the fact that they know nothing about the city, nothing worthwhile, anyway. Take a look at most of the spurious reviews that have abounded in the national press. Grace Dent, from The Independent, who apparently hails from Cumbria, has cast doubt on the validity of the second city’s intonation as depicted in the series. Lazy journalism from the increasingly downmarket, militantly PC liberal press, as usual.

Cillian Murphy, an Irish actor, who could probably have done much more, albeit superficially, with his pretty boy looks, doesn’t  just look the part of a Small Heath villain, he sounds like one to a tee as well.  When he struts down the terraced streets, his dead eyes always ready for combat, he makes people run, not towards him but well away. Good looks and incipient violence can have that effect. I have seen his type many times in Birmingham. The charm mixed with menace. It is Birmingham personified.

His biggest achievement, as well as that of writer Stephen Knight, is to make Birmingham look like an epic environment around the post-World War 1 period. This has come as a shock to many, who still perceive my city as something of a shithole, if I may be frank. Spaghetti Junction, the old Digbeth coach station, ‘landmarks’ such as the cylindrical Rotunda building, have frequently been mocked as evidence of an ugly urban landscape.

Peaky Blinders puts that all into a wider historical context. Because we are an industrial city, the ‘workshop of the world’ at one point and one which produced the Spitfire during World War II,, as well as thousands of cars from British Leyland’s Longbridge plant. We have been presented as a dull city, with which the apparently grating tones of our accents have tended to dovetail. But there has always been drama in Birmingham, some of it tragic, some of it uplifting, and not just on Broad Street on a Saturday night,

It was one of the main centres of the Chartist movement in the 19^th century, which fought bravely to win working men the right to vote.  We became the car manufacturing centre of the world in the early 20^th Century and one of the most heroic moments of that legacy was when 30,000 Birmingham engineers marched down to Saltley Gates in solidarity with striking miners to close down the coking plant there at the time. Aston Villa also won the European Cup in 1982. I was there during the celebrations. The roof tops were replete with the teaam's colours, claret and blue. Tom Hanks is also a big fan of the club, part of strange coterie of well-known names that follow the team's fortunes.

There have been very bad times too. The Birmingham pub bombings of 1974 were sickening. They took many innocent lives. Worst still it happened in a city where many Irish-born people had made their homes, my parents included. I was only seven but I remember the unbearable pain. The loss of life was dreadful but the backlash against the Irish community was a nightmare too.

Peaky Blinders is an eye-opener, not only because it presents my home city as an epic environment: a crashing, thudding arena of constant industry amid bloody vendettas but also because 1919 Birmingham is a ethnical melting pot. There is a large Chinese community, the Italians have a marked presence and of course the Irish abound in their numbers.

The Irish will always be a part of Birmingham but the Asians and Afro-Caribbean’s have joined the rest of what is one of the UK’s truly multi-ethnic centres of excellence. I particularly enjoyed the presence of locally-born Benjamin Zephaniah, towards whom the Shelby family are utterly colour blind. If that is not a lesson in which life does not move inexorably forward, I don’t know what is.

I have many fond memories of Peaky Blinders. Polly’s toughness, hand on a most wonderful curvaceous hip, Billy Kimber’s arrogance until Tommy got him one straight between the eyes but above all my home city, Birmingham, in all its wondrous historical majesty.

Tonight I was passing an off-licence on Vigarage Road, Kings Heath near where I live. There was a row going on with empty bottles waving around. Unfortunately, not an unusual sight in these parts on a Saturday night but part of me wished that Thomas Shelby might turn up to put an end to it.. There is violence of one kind, mindless you might call it, and then there is violence of another ilk altogether, that of protection. Peaky Blinders errs towards the latter. A staunch defender of the UK's second city.

A Charlatan of a Publisher

Back in November last year I met up in London  with  the owner of a Zagreb-based real estate research company, named Red Star (http://www.redstar.eu.com/), who I had previously contributed articles to his blogspot. I was there to discuss an idea both he and I had to launch a new real estate magazine covering Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

We brain-stormed some ideas and agreed that I should go away and think of a structure for the new publication. Through a fair bit of trial and error, as is the case in these situations, I came up with one, which divided CEE into three sub-regions, North-Eastern Europe, Central Eastern Europe and South Eastern Europe. I also set about recruiting another two journalists, one based in Budapest, who would write about Central Eastern Europe – Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania – and the other South Eastern Europe, consisting of the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria. My own patch, North Eastern Europe, would involve following developments in the Baltic States, Poland and Ukraine. Having worked for other commercial property magazines I knew this structure was an original one. During this time I was also engaged in other preparations for the magazine: liaising with the publisher and helping to get a sales representative on board. This lasted for a period of some months during which I received no pay.

Admittedly, when the first issue did come out, I was well remunerated but given the efforts I had put in leading up to that I didn’t think it unjustified. The magazine was also very well-received.

Real estate is a tough sector to write about, more difficult than covering other parts of the business world. As one source once said to me “in some languages the name for it is ‘immobilia”, that is it doesn’t move much”. Finding news on the market can be frustrating. But that did not prevent me from trying and I thought we came up with some original and varied articles, focussing on the different sectors of office, retail and logistics from as many of the countries on our beats as we could muster. Getting hold of company representatives to do interviews with us was by no means easy half the time, given that many were on business trips or were on holiday. The publisher also had a habit of disappearing without notice for weeks at a time as well, only then to turn up expecting everything to be in full swing.

With the third issue, which was due to coincide with an annual event Red Star held every year, things took an alarming turn, at least for me as a journalist. After being away from work for several weeks the publisher contacted me on a Tuesday and said he wanted us to arrange an interview with a company within the next few days before the CEO went on holiday on Friday. This, after I had already given the other journalists and myself a set of assignments. I told him that this was a very tall order to arrange at such short notice, which he acknowledged.

What I did not realise at the time was that this article was supposed to be paid for by the company being interviewed. In magazine publishing this is not uncommon but it invariably involves informing the reader that the article has been ‘sponsored’. However, in this case, the publisher had no intention of pointing this out and was happy for it to be presented as a normally-researched article. This contravenes all the ethics of journalism, which anyone with a modicum of intelligence will be aware of.

That particular article went unpublished and now the owner of the company appears to be reluctant to pay me for the four articles I wrote for that issue, as well as three others I spent a good deal of time editing. He has accused me of wasting his money, when this situation should never have arisen in the first place. Had things continued in the same vein, my job as editor would have become redundant anyway, as he seemed perfectly willing to go over my head in order to fulfil his squalid, money-grabbing aims. What had begun as a decent magazine was in the process of becoming a mere brochure.

All businesses need time to flourish and perhaps magazine publishing more than most. Not realising this is, in my view, a route to disaster, one the head of Red Star seems ever keen to follow.

CEE Property Insight - First Issue

It has been a long hard slog, which began as a germ of an idea I had in November last year but finally, the new property magazine covering Central and Eastern Europe, CEE Property Insight, of which I am the editor, has seen the light of day.

Me and Maggie Thatcher

Allow me to call myself one of ‘Thatcher’s children’, though if that had literally been the case I would have disowned her. If the other way round had been the state of affairs the separation would have occurred as a matter of course, inevitably.  In 1979 when she was elected prime minister I was 12 years old but it was only when she really got into her stride at the helm that I myself truly came of age, if I can claim that. I was a teenager after all.

I remember quite vividly the party election broadcasts from that campaign in 1979, despite my tender years at the time. Leading figures in the Labour party, such as Callaghan and Healey, appeared on the tiny television my family had in a small room to warn of the travails the country would have to endure if they elected the Tories to power. Mine was a safe Labour home, parented by Irish immigrants, so even though I had just started wearing long trousers to school, I agreed with that. Little did I know that much of what they warned of was 100% correct.

My father, a proud and hard-working employee at one of Birmingham’s most illustrious plants, was made unemployed soon after Thatcher took up the reins. The effects on our family are easily imaginable to anyone with the imagination required. 

In 1984, aged 16, I was among a large crowd – several hundred strong - attending a meeting staged by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Tony Cliff was the main speaker. He said what I had been hoping to hear on that day about the miners' strike. That the closure of the pits was part of a general attack on the British working class..I agreed with him fully. I joined the SWP soon afterwards.

That year was a fascinating one. I went to a demonstration in Nottingham and saw how passionate the miners were to their cause. With other ‘comrades’ I sat warming my hands over a boiler on a picket line in the Cotswolds. You couldn’t be anything but be impressed by the resolve of those miners. And they were from a pit that were the minority out on strike. The refrain, however, was “She’ll not get me back”. “She”, meaning Thatcher. We visited the house of one miner who had been arrested, I believe on more than one occasion as a result of the strike. He’d also been a soldier in Northern Ireland. He was more resolute than any of the others. Thatcher has been described as divisive. She certainly was in his case. He stepped over to the other side completely.

I went to university, became active again in political activity, got tired with it and then concentrated on books. Then came a day in London.

The poll tax riots. I had seen other Thatcherite-generated violence in London before but never anything like that. It was mayhem and for a time the people on the demonstration had control of the streets. Police officers were running away from members of the public shouting “no poll tax!” repeatedly. Then a police van sped down the street straight at protestors. Miraculously, no one was killed. But one thing was clear enough. The people of the UK had had enough of Thatcher. Even the shop workers were chanting “no poll tax!” on that day. I was just scared of the police. That was another indicator of life back then. You can speak of the free market all you want and how it liberated people from the so-called bureaucratic post-war consensus but Thatcherism also gave policemens’ batons a free hand.

Today, David Cameron said, “We are all Thatcherites now”. I am not. I am a Socialist. I am an anti-Thatcherite. What I experienced during my teenage years will not leave me, nor should it ever. Hopefully one day there will be a proper tribute to the victims of that woman’s legacy, someone who trod on the lives of countless number of working class people, including that of my own family 

Eric Joyce: A Man after my own Heart

I am beginning to warm to this Eric Joyce guy. At least when he gets tanked up he doesn't just pick on just anyone. He goes and batters other politicians. The UK population's id at work, in other words. He is also an excellent argument against minimum pricing on alcoholic drinks, one of a litany of shite ideas that Cameron and his crew have come up with. Drunken hooligans can crop up anywhere, even in Houses of Commons bars.

Me and the Horsemeat Scandal – A True Brit Grit Tale

After reading Charlie Brooker’s latest column in The Guardian, in which he suggests the horsemeat scandal in the UK may just be the thin end of the wedge and that: “They'll be turning up evidence of peopleburgers next. I know it and you know it. Might as well get used to the idea: you are a cannibal, and have been for years,” it called to mind a short story I had published last year in the charity anthology True Brit Grit. 

If it proves to be prescient, and I very much hope it won't, it was unintentional...

‘Meat is Murder’ appears as story number 22 in the collection.

Meat is Murder 

“Kurwa” (“Fuck”), she whispered to herself as she stepped off the coach timidly, her feet all blown up due to the 36 or so hours spent stuck rigid in her seat. Birmingham didn’t impress, not in the slightest. The rain looked as if it had been coming down for a month at least and the buildings looked as if they had gone up yesterday.

Not that Czarna Bialostocka, where Dorota hailed from, could claim much more in the aesthetics stakes. But that was one reason among many why she’d left the place. No shops, no nightlife, no young people, at least not anymore. Dorota had been the last person without grey hair to get out of the place. And her hair had always been a problem in Czarna Bialostocka, spiky and purple as it was. As the only punk bi-sexual in town, Dorota wasn’t much liked.

But she was cool, had friends in nearby Bialystok, who she’d meet up with, share joints and booze with and speak of dream-lives to spend elsewhere.

“Na Wyspi” (“to the islands”) was the common refrain, and by that they meant England. Now she was there. “Kurwa,” she said again as raindrops pelted her head.

But they were there. Her friends and acquaintances: Andrzej, Marcin, Aneta, Iza and Michal. They grabbed her bag and surrounded her with hugs, Polish style. She felt their love and the rain went away, even when it didn’t.

Home was a house, not a flat like in Poland, and there were more people in it than back in Czarna Bialostocka. Dorota shared a room with Aneta, who she liked, but didn’t think the feeling was mutual. She tossed and turned that night, wondering where she was, both sexually and geographically.

Work was in a meat packing factory, which is where the others made their money. Dorota pulled on her overalls with a grimace.

It wasn’t fun, much as she’d anticipated as soon as she stepped into the place. Glaring lights, having to wear a stupid hat and sticking floppy meat into bags wasn’t Dorota’s idea of a good time. Neither was it anyone else’s, but she seemed to suffer more than most, or so she assumed. Clocking off couldn’t happen soon enough and she felt a strange, maddening urge to wash her hands as soon as she left the line, despite the fact she’d been wearing plastic gloves throughout her shift. It’s because I used to be a vegetarian, she tried to convince herself. Yet, she had a hunch there was more to it than that.

Home meant more meat, cooked for dinner, which happened communally, each of the residents taking it in turns at the stove for one evening a week. Dorota wanted to say she’d become a vegetarian again, but knew she couldn’t. They’d look at her with incredulity.

Rejecting the consumption of flesh had ultimately proved futile in Czarna Bialostocka. All her parents would give her was potatoes and salad – while they enjoyed their schabowy (pork cutlets). The two of them made her sick, in more ways than one, but she couldn’t beat them so she had to join them. She swallowed the meat, opposing every inch of its journey to her intestines.

Work began again, another day of hell, yet sometimes it wasn’t. She saw that Andrzej and Marcin had developed a routine of abuse towards the factory’s product. Sometimes they would spit on it before packing it, other times they would drop it on the floor accidently-on-purpose before sending it down the line all neat and in tune with customers’ expectations. Dorota soon learned to copy her friends’ behaviour. Made her laugh for once.

Then, there was the beer and vodka at the weekends, which she couldn’t afford but the others could. It ended with her having sex with Andrzej on the floor of the living room after the rest had passed out. She liked it but he couldn’t stop grabbing her ‘dupa’ (arse) as if it was two pieces of, you know, meat. There was another thing. Andrzej liked his job way too much. 

Dorota started to look at the beautifully demure Aneta once more, with increased fascination. But Aneta didn’t look back. “Kurwa,” muttered Dorota.

Aneta was wan, frustrated to the point of implosion and in a suicide pact with herself. Dorota yearned for her because she exuded knowledge, whereas Andrzej did not.

Then once on the packing line Aneta suddenly whispered to Dorota: “This isn’t real meat. You are the only one who doesn’t know.”

She looked over to see Andrzej playfully stamp on a joint.

“But it looks real.”

“Can’t talk,” replied Aneta. “We’ll get into trouble.”

At lunch time Dorota went into the car park for a smoke, while the rest ate their sandwiches inside. A van pulled up. “More deliveries,” she said. “Kurwa”. Unknowingly the workers dragged out their cargo before her eyes. It had two arms and two legs. “Kurwa,” said Dorota.