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.

Another Piece in the TES

This article of mine is out today in the Times Ed.

Archive Article – Dublin Revisited

Originally published in the travel section of the now-defunct Poland Monthly magazine in December 2005

Dublin Revisited

Dublin has always been one of those reassuring cities, like Paris or Krakow, that would always be there waiting for me just as I had left it the last time. That could be because it has always been my most frequently-visited ‘other’ city. Though I was born and bred in Birmingham, both my parents are Dubliners.

But this time round I had had a seven-year break from the place, my longest yet, and what I saw came as a shock. One sure sign of change is scaffolding everywhere and you get to see plenty of it just minutes from the airport. It was in abundance all along the city’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street, large chunks of which were being refurbished.

Construction work is a pain, especially when you are visiting a place at your leisure and O’Connell Street has always been my favourite part of the city, despite any need for reassurance, mainly because it is testimony to radical and often violent change. The dust brought on by all the noisy labour forced me to give it a miss for much of the time I was there but there was an addition to the line of monuments that characterise the street, which made you realise that Ireland now has a very different attitude toward its past and how it relates to the present.

I had visions of myself walking up that avenue hand-in-hand with one or other of my parents, craning my neck up at Daniel O’Connell’ statue and being told all about his heroic role in Irish history. Then there was James Larkin, the trade union leader at the time of the 1913 Dublin Lock Out, and Charles Stewart Parnell, the parliamentary nationalist of the late nineteenth century, both of whom my dad would always point at with pride. And then later, there was Anna Livia Plurabelle, the character from James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake, also clad in stone on O’Connell Street, who was also there to personify the River Liffey, running under O’Connell bridge. A fictional heroine-cum-icon, it would seem. And she wasn’t the only one. Irish imaginations feed off one another. A minute’s walk or so away leads you to Grafton Street where Molly Malone stands, the subject of a mere song, yet plying her cockles and mussels (“Alive, Alive o”) stiffly next to her wheelbarrow.

Yet right smack in the middle of O’Connell Street is an interloper. And no-one in Dublin seems to know what to do with it. Since I was there last time a big needle, calling itself the ‘Millennium Spire’ has been planted in ground that until then had been hallowed turf for the nation’s heroes, real or not.

The sentimental among the Irish, who it has to be said constitute the vast majority, have not had much truck with this spear in the sky, which has played little or no role in rallying the population to the cause of the country.

Literary Dublin (i.e. most of its citizens) has predictably garlanded the ‘spike’ with a wealth of disparaging nicknames, such as the ‘Stiletto in the Ghetto’, the ‘Scud in the Mud’ and the ‘Stiffy by the Liffey’. But this is nothing new. Before she made way for the spike Anna Livia Plurabelle was dubbed the ‘Floozie in the Jacuzzi’ or the ‘Hoor in the Sewer’. Her inventor, the revered James Joyce, still stands at street level with his cane in nearby North Earl Street and has for long been known as the ‘Prick with the Stick’.

This all goes to show that a visit to Dublin brings with it very little in the way of reassurance, however much you may hope for it.

If that rather bland needle on O’Connell Street has lanced the Irish propensity for sentimentality, then so be it, though it is not that clever a symbol in my view. What it does represent, nevertheless, is a country that is far from gazing at its historical navel anymore. It is all upwards from here on in, aside from the beer, might I add.

Take the pubs these days. They all look as they ever did, which is a relief if you have just travelled in from the UK as I had, with all its obnoxious ‘vertical’ drinking and ear-bursting ‘fun-pubs’. Dublin’s boozers still put conversation first.

The guy handing me my pint of Guinness in one bar looked as if he could have come from Malaysia or thereabouts. In one of the previous places I had been served by someone who appeared Middle Eastern. It was disconcerting. Not because of where they were from, you understand, but because of where they were at that particular time: serving behind a bar. Dublin has become an even more intriguing city since it began saying ‘Cead Mile Failte’ (a hundred thousand welcomes) to foreigners hoping to make a new life for themselves there.

A trip back to Dublin has invariably meant that I imbibe as much of the black stuff that my liver and budget can handle and on previous visits the velvety slide of a mouthful of ‘stout’, as the Dubliners call it, down my throat always came courtesy of the patience and skill of that staunchest of the city’s institutions: the local barman.

In most cities, people serving behind a bar do so as a stop-gap before they move onto better things. But, until very recently, that was never so in Dublin. The barman there had always served an apprenticeship, which meant that when he passed you your pint he would be giving you the consummate drinking experience. You would have ordered that drink some fifteen to twenty minutes before putting it to your lips, the professional opposite ensuring that it had been through at least three stages of being poured and settled before presenting it to you as if some mysterious chalice of nectar.

But Ireland’s rampant economic success has called time on the Dublin born-and-bred barman. The only ones I came across were in the airport bar, a telling observation in itself. Now, overseas students man the taps and although tradition no doubt dictates that they still respect Guinness’s need to be at ease with itself before they deliver it to the customer, the tender loving care afforded to a pint by the Dublin barman is just not in their blood.

Molly Malone’s ‘fair city’ is no more. By that I do not mean you are likely to get ripped off in the place than you were in the past, just that the Irish capital has become one of Europe’s genuinely cosmopolitan cities it what seems like no time at all.

Every time I got on a bus, every time I looked out onto the street, there was a black or brown face. This in a country which not only did not have an empire but was active in opposing one for much of its history.

The Poles have made themselves known, as well, particularly on Grafton Street where the buskers and street artists gather. I spotted a Polish girl about to strike up on her guitar with a “little piece of Polish culture” as her notice on a piece of card stated, until she was interrupted by a passer-by and engaged in the compulsory chat.

Dublin has become a melting pot that O’Connell Street’s statues do no justice to. Time waits for no one, the city has become intangible and I do not feel I understand the place anymore, as I used to in the old days when strolling the streets with my parents and brother, or at other stages of my life. But that may not be a bad thing at all. At the end of the day you don’t travel to be reassured.