Berlin culture clash - By Derek Lord

 

Recently my son and I boarded a plane for Berlin. After a short-lived relationship with a young lady from that city Barry had developed an urge to see the place and since I have always had a certain fascination with the former capital of the Third Reich we had booked a city break through our local travel agent a few weeks before the Icelandic volcano brought air travel to a standstill. It was doubtful whether we would get away or not  and, if we did, whether we would get back home on Monday as scheduled. The travel agent assured me that if we had to stay on for a few more days they would reimburse us for any added costs so that alleviated some of my worries. As we took our seats on the plane we found ourselves surrounded on all sides by a large group of inebriated Glaswegian males sporting T-shirts with the slogan Berlin Stag Tour 2013 emblazoned on the back. This was followed by a list of the names of all the participants in this Germanic odyssey.  This was perhaps not too wise a move given that there was every chance that this mob would fall foul of the law during their booze-fuelled stay, in which case the polizei would only have to catch one of the gang to know the identity of every one of his mates. On the front of their shirts was a picture of a large banger with “Would you like a sausage” printed underneath. Whoever designed the shirts had obviously some inkling of the eating habits of the German citizenry. As I was to learn over the next few days Germans seem to exist solely on one form of sausage or another. The members of the stag party commandeered the drinks trolley as soon as it appeared among them and it didn’t move for the next two hours as the stewardesses dispensed every alcoholic beverage they had. Tough luck on any of the other passengers who fancied a tipple but the trolley dollies seemed only too happy to lap up the attention they were receiving from the revellers and given that they were not the most pulchritudinous stewardesses I have ever seen this was hardly surprising. As the drinks went down the noise levels went up. By the time we reached our destination it felt as if we were sitting in the middle of a riot. I was never so glad to get off a plane in my life.

The following night I bumped into the party animals once more when I went into one of the many so-called Irish bars in the city. They were on an extended pub crawl and didn’t stay too long. I was relieved to hear that they were going home a day earlier than me. I couldn’t have stuck another two hours with that crowd.

The only other heavy drinkers I came across over the weekend were a squad of Englishmen. At no time did I see anything like the sort of behaviour that we get in any Scottish city at the weekend with drunken lassies tottering along uncertainly on their six-inch heels, screaming at the tops of their voices, while the young men throw up in doorways. And yet the Germans have much more lax laws when it comes to drink. There is no ban on drinking in the street. In fact every second young person is carrying a bottle of beer. This is possibly because a bottle of beer costs about 30p in a shop and about £4 in a bar. And you thought that beer was cheap in our supermarkets. So much for our politicians’ minimum price argument. In Germany the beer is less than half the price in the shops that it is here but the Germans don’t take advantage of the cheap booze to drink themselves into a coma. They drink sensibly. Their idea of a good night out is to sit in a restaurant with their friends and have a good blether while they eat and drink in moderation. One upmarket bistro that I visited even had a large smoking section sandwiched between the eating areas with huge extractor fans cleaning the air. Perhaps the Germans have learned not to be dictated to by their politicians after the trouble it got them into last time. In one pub I visited the topers were smoking away to their heart’s content. I asked the publican how he got round the law and he explained that he was willing to take the chance of being caught. It was either that or go out of business as his customers would just go somewhere where they could smoke and there are plenty of other pubs who cock a snook at the authorities. He said that he was amazed at the way the Irish and Scots had caved in to the anti-smoking legislation without a fight but he suspected that it was because the fines here are three times what they are in Germany. 

By Derek Lord

Trident: Bomb or Bust - by Derek Lord

The first thing I ever had published was a short poem that appeared in my school magazine. Its subject was the atomic bomb. I can’t remember a word of it but I’m sure it wasn’t in Wordsworth’s class. However it must have struck a chord with the teacher who edited the magazine. Either that or the rest of the stuff he had to choose from that year was total rubbish. Either way my mother was delighted that her wee boy’s talent had been recognized. She kept that school magazine till her dying day. I’m not sure why I chose to write a poem about nuclear weapons at the age of 10. I suppose I must have seen newsreels of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when my mother took me to the local fleapit to see the latest Disney cartoon. 

Over the years I have managed to put any fears I may have had of sharing the same fate as the denizens of those Japanese cities to the back of my mind. But thanks to the location of my present abode those fears are once more coming to the forefront of my thoughts. Perched as it is on the banks of the Firth of Clyde my house provides me with a view of the nation’s submarines as they make their way to and from their base at Faslane. They are an awesome sight with their massive conning towers – a tiny sailor or two barely visible on top of the great, grey behemoths as they glide past the Rothesay ferry carrying their weapons of mass destruction to some secret ocean lair. 

When I watched the BBC documentary “Who needs Trident?” I had no idea just how many of those weapons the subs carried. At a guess I would have said two or three.

After all a nuclear missile is a pretty big piece of kit. I was amazed and alarmed to learn that each sub carries 48 of the things. And each one, we were told, carries a war head considerably more powerful than the one dropped by the Enola Gay. So each one of those sinister vessels has the power to wipe out 48 cities and destroy millions of lives at the touch of a button. The commander of one of them assured us that he would only press the said button if he was instructed by the current prime minister to do so, but, rather worryingly, he added that if all radio communications ceased he would open his safe and find out what his next step should be. Presumably it would be to target whatever country he felt was responsible for vaporising David Cameron and his cabinet. It’s at that point that even the most disciplined submarine commander would surely question the wisdom of slaughtering millions of innocent civilians in some foreign land simply as an act of revenge. It certainly wouldn’t have any strategic value. It would just be killing for killing’s sake. And how would he and his crew live with themselves after the event?

Of course, by that stage I would have no further interest in the proceedings since the submarine base and everything and everybody within a twenty mile radius of it would just be so much radioactive dust. It’s quite obvious that Faslane would be a priority target for any aggressor in the event of a nuclear war, yet the good people of Helensburgh that we saw interviewed for the programme are desperate to hold on to the base because its closure would be bad for business. Well, a nuclear strike a few miles up the road would be considerably worse for business. I get the feeling they haven’t really thought this thing through, or perhaps they are convinced that a nuclear war will never happen. If that’s so I would draw their attention to the findings of a group of scientists who, many years ago, used the services of a state-of-the-art computer to explore the possibilities of human inter-stellar travel. The computer concluded that humanity would wipe itself out long before it had acquired anything like the power needed for space travel. 

And the way things are going I’ve a feeling that the computer got it right.

Derek Lord

Baby Boomers

 

By Derek Lord

As the first of the baby boomers, the generation conceived in the wake of the Second World War, make it over the finish line of their working lives, for some the outlook is rather bleak, especially if they worked in the private sector and never earned enough to be able to save for the rainy days ahead. And now there is an element of resentment creeping into the minds of those citizens less stricken in years. As far back as 2004 the then Tory shadow chancellor warned that the baby boomers posed as big a threat to the nation as terrorism or global warming. With their inadequate state pensions they will be forced to put themselves at the mercy of a cash-strapped government, looking for help with their council tax bills, their heating bills and all the other demands made on their meagre incomes. And as their ageing bodies continue to deteriorate they will be putting further pressure on an already buckling NHS. Things are no better across the Atlantic where economists are warning that American boomers are threatening the very fabric of society. It reminds me of a sci-fi story I read more than forty years ago that foresaw a time when governments would have to take drastic action to rid themselves of the burden of their senior citizens. One solution was to offer free bus rides for the oldies. The buses would travel along roads that passed through tunnels. The tunnels would have steel shutters at both ends. These shutters would slam shut at irregular intervals and then a gas would be released, killing the occupants of any vehicles trapped within the tunnel. Government employees would then come along and remove the corpses. So, if you are one of the first wave of baby boomers, think twice before you rush out and apply for your free bus pass. There may be some sci-fi fans among our lords and masters who have read that same story.

On a lighter note, it must be said that the baby boomers have had it pretty good. School wasn’t quite as easy as it is these days. Teachers were still allowed to knock them about a bit if they got out of hand, and since many of those teachers had faced the worst that the Wehrmacht could throw at them they weren’t about to be intimidated by a classroom of snotty kids. My history teacher was a tank commander who took on Rommel at El Alamein and the deputy head was a former Regimental Sergeant Major who had fought his way from Normandy to Berlin. When those guys told you to pay attention you didn’t give them any lip. But the boomers managed to avoid all that soldiering stuff.  They were the first generation in quite a while who were not conscripted into somebody’s army whether they wanted to fight or not. They were too young for the Korean War and National Service finished when the youngest of the boomers were 17, so things worked out pretty well for them. On the cultural side they were just coming out of puberty when somebody came up with the word ‘teenager’ and suddenly they had a special identity that had never existed before. Instead of going straight from their school uniforms into the same sort of clothes their parents wore they could deck themselves out in denim and mini-skirts. And the music scene exploded with Bill Haley and the Comets, followed by Elvis, the Beatles et al. Then when their hormones were exploding all over the place along came the contraceptive pill, and, for the first time in history, they could indulge their natural desires without the risk of being frog-marched up the aisle at the end of a shotgun. To make things even better some clever Scotsman invented penicillin so all those nasty bugs that had lain in wait for earlier generations who over-indulged themselves in the wild oats department could be vanquished with a single jab. But, when they got all that nonsense out of their system, most of the boomers picked a mate and got married just like their mum and dad had done. The word ‘partner’ still referred to someone you set up a business with – not a home. The only other time it was used was in cowboy films. Gabby Hayes was Roy Roger’s partner, but only in the sense that they took on the baddies together. Brokeback Mountain was still a long time in the future, although I must admit some of those sequined shirts that Roy Rogers wore were a bit on the gay side.

Why I believe in paranormal service

 By Derek Lord

IN the course of the 20 years or so that I wrote a weekly column for the Aberdeen Press & Journal, I would occasionally recount my experiences of the paranormal.

This would inevitably result in readers’ letters accusing me of being a liar, a fantasist, a raving lunatic, or worse. Never once did I get a comment from anyone who had had similar experiences, so I thought I would just throw this one out there in the hope of finding someone who could identify with those experiences.

My interest in the subject of the paranormal began at the tender age of 19. I had just beaten more than 50 applicants for the post of junior sports reporter with the Belfast Telegraph. The late, great Malcolm Brodie, a Scotsman who became a legend in Northern Ireland , interviewed me for the job.

I was over the moon when I found out he had selected me. I received my letter of acceptance on the Wednesday telling me to report for duty the following Monday.

Later that Wednesday morning, a cleaning lady called Margaret O’Flaherty arrived to do some dusting round our house. My mother wasn’t in the best of health at the time and needed a hand with the housework. When Margaret had finished, my mother sat down with her for a cup of tea.

These were the days before tea bags. When they had finished their tea, Margaret offered to give Mum a psychic reading based on the tea leaves left stuck to the inside of her cup. When she had finished, my mother called for me and insisted that I get a reading.

As a cynical teenager I thought it was all a lot of nonsense but I reluctantly agreed. I drank my tea and proffered the empty cup. Mrs O’Flaherty gazed into it and then told me that I would be crossing water shortly and that I would go into a building with a very long counter in search of a job.

I would be met by a woman who would lead me up some stairs to an office where I would be interviewed by a man with a moustache and glasses. The man would be very impressed by me. I sat grinning smugly as she spoke. She didn’t know that I would be embarking on my chosen career just 10 miles up the road in five days.

Two later my mother and father separated and my mother insisted that I accompany her to Coventry where she planned to stay with relatives. It broke my heart to have to phone Malcolm Brodie and tell him I couldn’t accept the job he had so generously offered me.

So there I was on the Belfast to Liverpool ferry within days of O’Flaherty’s reading. Two months later I applied for a job as a cub reporter with the Coventry Evening Telegraph. It was only when I entered the building and saw the long counter that I remembered Margaret’s prophecy.

Would I be met by a woman and shown upstairs to an office? Tick. Would the man interviewing me have a moustache and glasses? Tick. Would he be impressed by me? Tick (In the event, he put me on a shortlist of six out of 70 applicants). Unfortunately the editor gave the job to one of the other five and I spent the next year working as a quality control inspector in a very noisy factory.

Over the course of the next 40 years, Margaret O’Flaherty continued to predict what lay ahead for me in the same minute detail she had delivered in that first reading. And she never charged me or anyone else a penny.

Her reputation grew and she would have captains of industry lining up at her door for her advice. But, when she was put in front of the TV cameras, she froze. If she had been a phoney she would have prepared some Doris Stokes-style codswallop to get her through. But she was honest enough to say that there was nothing coming through for her that night and most viewers would have concluded that she was a fake.

I knew differently.