This Easter weekend brought Sadness and heartbreak.
Three lives lost, one father and two mothers.
These, of course, are the only ones we know of … but the devastating affects resonate amongst family, friends and sadly their children.
During Easter my Facebook memories appeared, highlighting suicide. People always ask for the statistics of the deaths kept behind Family Court doors.
The answer is very simple. There are none. Zero. Zilch.
There is a dire need for accountability.
Three deaths. Three lives gone. Families, friends, children left behind. Heartbreak, the lack understanding and care.
We are well aware there are many more deaths.
We are well aware it’s not only a UK problem. It’s a worldwide problem.
Trigger points: Easter, Christmas, Halloween, Bonfire Night, 4th of July, Thanksgiving, birthdays, in fact any special holiday.
These contribute to the already struggling parents. It’s not just the special days, it can be a moment in time remembered, a song, a film, a park. So many other things. One thing is clear no-one – and I mean no-one – will ever ever understand what a parent goes through during contact denial and family courts.
Both of these should come with a public health warning of risk to life.
Over the years I have delivered many live video’s about suicide behind secret family courts. Over the years myself and others have saved hundreds of lives, if not thousands. Believe me, what these parents go through you should never wish on your worst enemy.
It’s ignorance that stops the raising on the awareness on suicide… it’s the secret family court doors.
Family courts say it’s in the best interest all the children, closed family courts.
I have questions…
Is it in the best interest of children to learn the parents have killed themselves? Is it in the best interest OF the children when the family courts completely destroy the absent parent?
Is it in the best interest of the children to leave a huge void in their lives? Is it in the best interest of the children to cut-out half their heritage?
Or is it simply the family courts avoiding accountability?
The innocent forgotten children need their voice. We will be their voice!
Children first every time, that’s our motto!
No parent should die trying to see their children.
Andrew John Teague recorded this to get his message across:
This is the most historic building in Moston, North Manchester. Thanks to the people on Facebook for letting us know that the beautiful old hall is back on the market.
Now this could be the time to fight to save the building finally…we at the Preservation Society have battled for 2 years to protect this 500-600 year old building.
This is part of what Right Move have to say in their sales pitch…
“Potential The property is sold on an unconditional basis only however, potential buyers may wish to consider a range of opportunities for development of the land and Hough Hall itself. Whilst the site and buildings could well lend themselves to commercial uses a residential scheme may be possible with the refurbishment and development of Hough Hall. If sold for new build it could to comprise 12 houses and six flats, but it would appear planning permission would have to be obtained.”
We have given some shots of Hough Hall courtesy of Matt Holmes (www.facebook.com/TheDerelictExplorer)
#moston #manchester #houghhall #derelict #save the hall
Grave robbing has never gone away – there is still a lucrative and macabre market for stolen headstones and markers.
Graveyards in the UK are regularly plundered by thieves who steal tombstones‚ vases‚ and sculptures and sell them as garden ornaments.
And in some parts of the world undertakers place orders for stones on the black market. They buy them cheaply, re-cut and sell them at market price
Not too long ago thieves stole a memorial stone from the grave of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis in a Macclesfield grave yard.
Ian Curtis – grave robbed
Staff said: “A rare mowing stone has been taken. It is about a square foot with a hole for a floral tribute, it is purely there for aesthetics, there is no inscription on it.”
Now, in Moston, Manchester, North of England, a community-minded mum is trying to find the family who had a small statue placed on a loved one’s grave.
She was litter-picking at Carters field near St Joseph’s Cemetery.
She said: “This is a long shot but I want to try to reunite this statue and get it back to a loved one’s grave on the statue of Our Lady was found on Carters fields on the Lightbowne Road-side and judging by the weight of it, is probably from a plot that side of the Cemetery.
“I’ve cleaned it up and its in an okay condition, a bit of the paint has chipped off and is blistered in places.
“There is a code on the bottom A28 which I believe is the catalogue number & not a grave reference. So, does anyone know any family missing a statue? Can you help share & reunite them?”
Why grave yards and cemeteries have become playgrounds for yobs and hunting ground for callous thieves is difficult to comprehend.
The desecration of our dead is a through back to Victorian tales of tombstone ransacking and the pillaging of ancient religious monuments under the guise of rescuing history.
War graves officials for instance said they were “deeply shocked” by the theft of bronze panels from a memorial in a Manchester cemetery.
Idiots vandalised 70 headstones at Urmston Jewish cemetery in Manchester causing £100,000 of damage.
Police said they were treating it as “hate crimes”.
Ian Levy, chairman of the Whitefield Synagogue Burial Board asked at the time: “Why is this happening? If you saw it, you wouldn’t believe it.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission spokesman Peter Francis said: “Thefts of this nature have sadly been on the increase because of the global increase in the price of raw materials.
“However, it absolutely beggars belief that someone could stoop so low as to steal a memorial.”
The panels were probably taken for scrap and could be worth about £300 each. But it would cost thousands to replace them.
The Manchester Martyrs is one of the best-known monuments in Moston.
It commemorates William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O’Brien who were executed for the murder of a police officer in Manchester, England, in 1867. It has been vandalised and restored over the years.
Greg Abbott has banned publicly-funded agencies from forcing people to provide proof of a Covid-19 vaccine if they need their services.
In other words Abbott has gone a long way down the line to ban the ubiquitous Covid passport.
He did this as the so-called passports are being developed across the world as a method of quickly proving someone’s vaccination status.
Gregg Abbott
But Britain too could back off from the passport plan. Ministers’ plans are in doubt after Labour indicated that it would oppose “discriminatory” proposals and Conservative MPs claimed the plan would create a “two-tier” Britain.
Jon Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said his party would “have to be convinced” to back the measures and warned that they could be unfair.
The government says there will be places where Covid passports will never be required – including essential shops, public services, and public transport.
It has also said there will be exemptions for some people “for whom vaccination is not advised and repeat testing is difficult”.
Nevertheless, proposals for vaccine passports have been criticised as “dangerous, discriminatory and counterproductive” by dozens of MPs. Senior Tory backbencher Mark Harper has called for a vote on the issue.
But it is interesting to note that the population of Britain is one of the most closely watched in the world . The British Security Industry Association estimates that the total number of CCTV cameras in the UK stands at somewherebetween 4 million and 6 million. That’s around 7.5 cameras for every 100 people in the country.
We are in fact the third-highest ‘watched’ people on the planet just behind the US and China. And then of course there is social media Big Data.
So, do Covid passports really matter?
But in America it has turned into a massive debate with Republicans opposing passports, claiming it is an infringement of freedom and privacy.
Supporters, say the passports are a way to confidently go back to activities we took for granted.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis also stopped state agencies from using vaccine passports and said no business can require their customers to display them.
Businesses can tell their employees to get a Covid-19 vaccine, according to guidance from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Most plans for vaccine passports are looking at a smartphone app, although some are in a paper form and are seen as a way to ensure Covid free spaces at concerts, restaurants and sporting events.
New York was the first state to unveil its Excelsior Pass — which can be used to quickly show proof of a vaccination or a negative test.
Israel, which has fully vaccinated over half of its population, also introduced a vaccine passport for anyone in the country. Vaccine passports are being developed all over the European Union.
#texas #covidpassport #US #boris #UK #Europe
Another side of Bob’s rough and rowdy ways … how 50 year old photo told the right tale
In 1964, Bob Dylan’s Another Side was released much to the discomfort of people who had already claimed the youngsinger as their new god of traditional folk.
Little did they know how he was about to really rock their their staid beardy banjo-ey world twelve months later.
They just stuck their fingers in their ears and said young Bob had “lost touch” and was trapped by fame.
Meanwhile, photographer Ian Berry, from the scruffy UK industrial city of Preston, Lancashire, had made his reputation by exposing the horrors of South Africa, Sharpeville in 1960. Photography was his own way of making a protest.
In 1964 – when Bob was showing his other side – Ian was schlepping around Paris and London. Then, one day, he took what he thought was a good photo of the UK’s smokey cellar club life.
Funnily enough Ian says that in the 60s he had only a sketchy vision of Dylan’s existence.
But roughly 50 years later their paths crossed in a most unexpected way.
That photograph became the cover of Bob’s stunning Rough and Rowdy Ways.
Today, Ian, who is in his 80s, admits that he still doesn’t know a lot about Dylan and his music. But he said: “A record cover for Dylan is a great compliment.”
His photo shows a well-dressed couple dancing in a club – a man leans over a jukebox behind them.
And the historic photograph has all the romance of the hedonistic Sixties.
Ian took the picture at an old underground club on Cable Street in Whitechapel in East London.
He had been commissioned to get images of black culture in England. “I was working quickly, and in very poor light, shooting away with a 35-millimetre camera,” he says. “I knew at some point I’d have to leave because I hadn’t asked permission to be there.”
After about 15 or 20 minutes , he says people started throwing beer bottles at him.
Rough and rowdy ways, so to speak!
Today, Berry’s vast archive is controlled by the Magnum Photos agency. The agency previously made a deal with the Dylan camp for Bruce Davidson’s 1959 photograph of a young couple making out in a car, which appeared on the cover of 2009’s Together Through Life.
Although Ian isn’t that familiar with Dylan’s music, his wife is a big fan. “She’s more enthusiastic than I am,” he said. “But of course I’ve regularly listened to ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ and so forth, but they are her records rather than mine.”
Dylan is possibly the most prolific artist alive. He has made 38 studio albums, 91 singles, 40 music videos, many films, 11 books, a Nobel Prize, the American Medal of Freedom from US President Obama and has performed thousands of live concerts.
He has been the hokey, the mountain man, the rock god, the Southern preacher man, gospel performer, country god, the cowboy, the wild child, the Lothario, the drunk, the addict, the river boat captain, the general, the old blues man, the hippy, Elvis, the crooner, the punk, the eccentric… his guises are as many as his musical abilities.
The title Rough and Rowdy Ways is a homage to Jimmy Rogers.
Picture of Ian by Daniele Mattioli, cover art originally Ian Berry, Dylan pic, Pixabay
While social media monsters scream from their desktops that the world-as-we-knew-it is being buried under government, ‘big pharma’, journalistic and fat cat lies’…
And while they gnash madly as they describe ambitions to shoot little Bill Gates ‘submarines of control’ into our veins … it looks like the world might be re-setting all around us.
We just might be on the verge of a journey back to some kind of normality, although I do doubt that we will ever return to 100pc of what we had before.
After all, shocks like the coronavirus pandemic – and there is no doubt the shock is real, even if you don’t believe the pandemic is – happen very rarely and must have permanent and far-reaching changes for us all.
Right now as far as output is concerned the world economy is heading for recovery but the legacy of Covid-19 will deform and mutate global any growth.
Factory and service jobs are already being done by robots. And it will get worse. White-collar workers are unlikely to swap their firesides for sterile offices and Governments will undoubtedly play a larger role in the lives of us all.
Yes, keyboard warriors you are right! Our safety nets and personal rights need patching up as soon as possible.
But the outrageous lying, fact bending, twisted, scare-mongering, freakish emoji -ridden, smiley assassin of social media need to be brought to heel just like all other traditional media is in this ever-spinning world.
It is clear the one thing social media doesn’t care about is The Truth. All its Fat Controllers care about is collecting our data and ‘running’ our lives. Isn’t that what amateur pundits claim the powers-that-be invented the pandemic to do?
But surely we all have to say that the British government is right to explore mass rapid testing and vaccine passports right now.
As long as they do not become a permanent fixture in our lives then they may well speed our return to ‘normality’.
Then there is the new one-shot vaccine which could allow us foreign travel.
Boris has raised hopes by revealing what professional pundits are treating with caution by describing it as a mass testing blitz.
But at least we are not being hysterical about it behind little round grumpy and angry faces.
Yes, people soon will be able to collect free Covid tests which give results in just minutes. Everyone will be able to order kits at home, get them through work, at schools, or through testing centres across the country.
And as I write this four million Covid-19 injections were poked into American arms. This too is being seen as track back to ‘normal life’..
About 106 million people have had one dose in the US while 61 million are fully dosed. Whether by luck or design, President Joe Biden has actually lived up to his major promise to get out vaccines fast.
And that’s not to be Trumped at! No!
Let’s jump on the bus of hope, pay the fare and go where it takes us.
Then, when we arrive, demand our democratic rights to investigate and interrogate those who chose our route home.
***
Still, the nightmare is not over though. The emergence of new coronavirus variations in Africa have contributed to an increase in deaths across the continent.
At least 40 countries have now seen a second wave of the pandemic.
And India’s health ministry has said that it has recorded an all-time high 103,558 new coronavirus cases, the highest daily tally.
Mumbai, India’s financial capital and the capital of Maharashtra state, is now under stringent lock-down.
But what of the long-term future?
It is a fact that we are going to have to learn to live with Covid. The rub is that, whether you believe it exists or not, it’s going to be with you.
And we only want constant tests and vaccine passports for as short a time as possible.
We don’t want to become prisoners of this Dystopian world that has ‘walled’ us into our homes and our countries.
Covid could lead us to become the victims of Health Apartheid, Finally the world is separated.
And cynicism is setting in everywhere too, not least on social media.
People are still openly breaking the “rules” in the UK, which automatically makes them redundant.
And in a way who can blame them?
All our civil liberties and being mashed up. If you look at it as cold hard fact, we are simply banned from meeting our families in their homes.
This is inhumane and cruel and against every right we have held close since society began.
If it continues it is a new form of Nazism.
The death rate is nearing single figures and those who are vulnerable have been vaccinated and the R-rate remains where it needs to be despite schools reopening and rule flouting.
I say open the doors! Let us out! Let us discover the future, no matter how frightening it is… after all it is our future.
The Preservation Society and the Standard Gazette have agreed to join forces when the news demands it and expose corrupt politicians, cheating fat cats and lying conmen … we will also look at the news BEHIND the news! We start with the story of the awful killing of Reggae superstar Lucky Dube …
By Ehi E Ekhator, editor at The Standard Gazette, and Leigh G Banks…
Thokozani Dube was 21-year-old when his dad, legendary reggae singer Lucky Dube, was murdered for his new car in Johannesburg.
Lucky had dropped-off Thokozani and his sister Nkulee at their uncle’s house in the poor suburb of Rosettenville where ANC president Oliver Tambo, Archbishop Desmond Tutu attended school.
Thokozani and his sister Nkulee
Then Lucky headed back towards his own home in the upmarket cafe-society city of Newcastle, KwaZuluNatal, three hours away.
Within seconds though, he was dead, slumped at the wheel of his new Chrysler 300c. It had cost 750,000-rand and was a limo drug dealers, pimps and gangsters in South Africa’s City of Gold would ‘kill for’…
Particularly if a Nigerian was driving it.
And that’s what happened, three gunmen were cruising looking for an upmarket car, saw Lucky, thought he was Nigerian and without a thought shot him to death.
Lucky’s killing was no doubt racist and financially motivated car-jacking. South Africans thugs regularly target those from other African nations blaming them for food shortages, lack of jobs and for the poverty they live in.
Lucky’s killing was all so pointless.
As he was dying from the bullets his Chrysler luxury sedan veered into a tree. His killers left it and fled in an old battered Volkswagen Polo back to the slum district of Spruitview, Katlehong.
But what they’d done had also appalled the killers’ families and Mpho Maruping, the wife of one, ‘shopped’ them. She gave police details of the botched hijacking.
Whether Mpho turned state witness to protect herself or out of horror at the crime is debatable, but her evidence meant game over for the killers.
And they resorted to trying to mitigate their crime by saying they didn’t know Lucky was famous and saying of course, they thought he was Nigerian. However, it cut no ice in this racism-riddled country.
But the killing of Lucky Philip Dube reminded the world just how violent South Africa was – and to some extent still is – towards Asian and African immigrants in the early decades of the 21st century.
According to figures from South African Police, between April 2006 and March 2007, the country recorded 19,000 murders, 52,000 rape cases and nearly 13,000 people were car-jacked.
Lucky Dube was a Zulu born in Ermelo, formerly the eastern Transvaal, Mpumalanga, on August 3 1964. His mother, Sarah, called him ‘Lucky’ because she had suffered a series of miscarriages.
Lucky Dube
And Dube did get lucky.
Forty-one years later, he was good-looking, rich and famous and his music was creating political controversy in many parts of the world. He’d appeared with controversial acts like Sinead O’Conner, Peter Gabriel and Sting.
He was also making it big in Australia. His lyrics resonated with Aboriginal Australia in a massive way. Lucky’s most requested song was Slave.
By the time his tour of the territories began in May 2005, he had thousands of fans and played in Alice Springs, Darwin and Cairns.
Lucky had also made it through the car-crash of his failed marriage to Zanele Ndluli and he adored his seven children.
In late March, 2009, Judge Seun Moshidi of the South Gauteng High Court sentenced the murderous trioSifiso Mhlanga, aged 34, Julius Ngxowa, 32, and Mbuti Mabe, 31, to life.
“They are in prison till this very day,” TK Dube, who because of them, effectively lost his dad twice, said. “People often ask me how it feels to have had “Lucky Dube” as my father, given his social status. To me, he was just a father, and I knew little about him as the man on stage …”
As he said this Dube’s songs were still being seen as dissident by supporters of apartheid. Lucky Dube wasn’t a fan of the then-government either and his music was regularly described as criminal.
Songs like 1987’s ‘Slave’, 1988’s ‘Together As One’ and ‘Prisoner’ with lyrics like ‘Somebody told me about it/When I was still a little boy/ He said to me, crime does not pay/He said to me, education is the key’, before offering the counterpoint: ‘The policeman said to me, son/They won’t build no schools anymore/All they’ll build will be prisons, prisons,’ had him marked as a trouble causer.
Sadly, eleven years after is death, South Africa is still embroiled in racism – a country full of greed, xenophobia and hate. Places like Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban and other cities still have systematic segregation where the rich live in the rich northern suburbs. The poor struggle in disease-ridden shanties.
In 2019 riots were still happening in Johannesburg and spreading to Durban, leading to the death of at least seven people, mostly black migrants.
Despite the government’s promises to combat xenophobia, it has done little to change things. But there is no doubt Dube’s music changed lives and offered hope to many South Africans during politically sanctioned racial segregation. Unlike his siblings, TK reunited with his dad at 11. His mother had dumped the ‘Rastaman’ years earlier. A decade later though, the blow of losing Lucky again was almost unbearable.
Even today he refuses to confirm or deny he actually witnessed the shooting.
But there is no doubt that TK is made of a similar kind of steel to Lucky and after the murder he threw himself into his education and graduated just a year later. His father’s absence on graduation day broke his heart though. “Unfortunately, when I finished my qualification in 2008, he was not around to see it,” he said.
“I felt that graduating at that time was pointless because my number one supporter was not there.
“But I remember my father said, ‘look, TK, look at the world around you; everything is going towards IT. You need to make sure you are part of the revolution. I believed what I said … but when he wasn’t there, I felt really useless.” One of Lucky Dube best-known songs ‘Son, I’m Sorry’ describes the break-up and how he felt his children shouldn’t suffer over his parent’s actions. TK said, “What stands out for me in the song is the apology. It takes a real man to apologise, to apologize to your son or daughter, that’s wow. Many parents don’t do that, but to show the type of man he was, to humble himself that way, for me, that is a real man.” TK would compose songs and sing but he said, “One of the biggest things for my father was education. The reason for that, I think, is that he struggled for his education. One of the things he said to me was, ‘listen, make music, I don’t mind, but you must have an education.’ Education was everything to him.” He said, “my father explained the reason why he said I should not make music now. I understood why he wanted that to happen.” Unfortunately for him, Despite losing his number one fan, TK went ahead to obtain NDip – Information Technology majoring in Software Development, Btech – Information Technology Management, Honours – Information Systems and Technology Management, PGDip – Management Practice, MBA Final year.
His life, he says, has been a journey, and despite hurdles, he has continued to get stronger. But he has never settled in to a permanent relationship. Meanwhile, TK registered a company in 2010 to manage his father’s old band, “Lucky Dube Band”. The band released a song, “Celebrate his life”, about four years ago.
But like in all modern music tragedies, the story doesn’t stop at the grave and Lucky’s case, it’s his car that keeps on going but in a way that many see as cynical and insensitive. The wrecked 300c was bought and put back together again – then a wedding company Our Perfect Wedding got hold of it and used as macabre limo.
Its link to Lucky was used to publicise to the company.
And in another move a ride in the in Lucky’s Limo became a prize in a TV show.
Almost two decades ago the British media was awash with anti-migrant stories because Romanians, Bulgarians, Slovaks and Poles were using their European freedom to build new lives in the UK.
Or to send money back to their families in their poverty-ridden homelands.
And the Brits, with their under-the-radar alternative lives in Spain, Portugal and France, their beachside holiday homes and sunny Benidorm breaks, didn’t like it…
On the whole, our neighbours came across the Channel to take the jobs we just didn’t want to do, fruit pickers, healthcare workers and cleaners. And we made them unwelcome.
We decided they were gypsies, tramps and thieves. They weren’t of course. Generally they were good honest people.
But generally we decided we didn’t like them and, on the whole, didn’t make them welcome.
A number of years ago, Andrea and I reversed the process and shipped out to Slovakia to begin a new life. We love it here and we have many friends.
But as Covid put our dreams on hold we began to experience, in a small way, the isolation of living in a foreign country …
I am an immigrant.
When I realised it I was standing in a football crowd-sized collection of the Slovak motley, the well-off, factory workers, doctors and nurses, big police with guns and burly security guards.
The football crowd was there for a common purpose though, to have a ‘freedom’ jab of AstraZeneca vaccine. The police and security guards were there to make sure we all stayed in line.
But despite all the hundreds of people around me, I felt completely alone.
It was like we were back in the 1970s Eastern Bloc when everybody stood in line to get to almost bare shop shelves. The original bread line.
And until a couple of days ago the lack of information from the Slovak government about vaccinations had created a stream of social media disinformation.
Keyboard pundits were making bizarre claims, like there are only 19 vials of vaccine in our green and snowy land of five and a half million people.
Then, without fanfare, emails began to arrive giving us less than two days to fill in forms and get down to the ‘gymnasium’ vaccine point.
There were maybe 500 Slovaks with me in this queue outside an old rundown Russian utility building at the heart of the tiny mountainside city of Poprad,
My wife and business partner, Andrea, and me have worked for Slovakia for fifteen years, mainly remotely from the UK, promoting tourism in newspapers, magazines, radio and the internet.
Business was doing so well that we decided to make our home here almost four years ago.
Since then, Andrea and I have made many friends in Slovakia, they are almost all Slovaks who have a powerful and eloquent command of the English language.
The thing is there are very few English people in this city.
There are a couple of Americans and some Vietnamese, Chinese and many Roma, some indigenous, some from Romania of course and many from other poverty riddled cities and mountains of central and eastern Europe.
But, because our many friends – IT experts, plumbers, electricians, teachers, officer workers, estate agents and workers in alternative medicine – had, over the years, learned to speak English, we lazily became comfortably numb and a bit decadent.
After all, we live in a loft conversion a few minutes walk from the city centre and, before the world’s Covid lock-down, we shlepped around top restaurants and drank to excess in cocktail bars and beer joints.
We drive a big limo with British plates too…
We felt safe inside our bubble of friends and with the arrogance of cosseted immigrants, we never bothered to learn much of the language.
I say this to my eternal shame.
And today – with Andrea waiting for me on a park bench five minutes – I was paying the price, reaping the understandable indifference of my fellow citizens.
Let me explain something, I’m tall and lanky with long grey hair and I dress, sometimes, like an old biker.
Yes, I stand out in a crowd. I always have done and always will do, I guess. My mother used to harangue me in working-class despair ‘oh why can’t you be nice and ordinary?”
I’ve always been proud of being a bit different.
But right now I feel like the Afro-Carribbeans who were invited to work in our factories and drive our buses.
The late March sun was blisteringly bright, the jagged teeth of the High Tatras mountains were white and snowy clean. The air sharp.
I stand in the queue with everybody else near the grand hangar of the city’s world famous hockey team. I’m gripping my vaccine forms filled in using Google translate and a friend who lives in a yellow and orange tower block nearby.
I am a travel writer, I have worked in zones of war, written lyrically about everywhere from New York to Timbuktu and it’s been brilliant. Andrea, has travelled the world with me for 20 years.
But we are now strangers in a strange land and as I waited I felt vulnerable and afraid. Funny thing for big burly biker look-alike.
I was standing still while the crowd filed past me and went to various positions in the queue, slotting in like dice. I remained stoically where I was, Covid papers scrunched in my palm and my Alpine ski shades steaming up because of my face mask.
Dozens went by, some jostling me and sniggering in my direction. I didn’t know what was wrong, I was just getting a bit angry at all the people pushing ahead of me until I ended up at the very back of the queue.
Then a middle-aged couple stopped beside me and said ‘Time?’
I looked at my watch and said 8.50am. They both began laughing like bronchitic frogs, nodding and elbow-jabbing each other with mirth. It was the husband, a short stocky man of 50-ish in a faded shell suit, who took mercy on me and pointed to my handful of papers. I showed him and he spotted right away that my appointment was 9am – they both made whooshing noises with their mouths and wafted their hands at me: “Front … front!” they said in unison and began laughing good naturedly at me again.
The crowd wasn’t exactly hostile as I regained my ground but watched with a docile sullenness, like cows chewing cud.
But nobody objected as I slid into what I considered to be my rightful place ten rows from the front. After a couple of minutes the battered barrel of a man in his 60s next to me growled something, I apologised and simpered: “Sorreee English.”
He stuffed his hands deeper into the pockets of his worn patched overalls, growled and refused to look in my direction again.
Inside, the armed police eyed me with suspicion. But a second person finally took pity on the poor immigrant.
He was a tight-featured young man, in his mid-twenties, with floppy covid-length hair and severe spectacles. He had obviously spotted my discomfort and waved me over to the table where he was checking vaccine papers. I went across to him, he smiled beneath his clinical mask and said: “I speak English, let me see your papers please.”
He asked me question after question about my health, allergies etc, ticked a few boxes and politely directed me to a solitary wooden chair outside a makeshift canvas cubicle.
I sat there for a few minutes. I nodded to the man opposite me – I was taken by the fact he was still wearing his Christmas jumper with a reindeer on it in March – and he said a mask-muffled: “Dobry Den,” meaning good day.
I replied wrongly: “Dakuiem ...” I knew as it left my lips it was the wrong response and I’d, in fact, just thanked him for speaking to me. He looked confused and turned his eyes to his boot straps.
I stared towards the ceiling as if searching for my immigrant god!
Eventually I was summoned inside the makeshift canvas cubicle. There were three others already inside making social distancing very difficult, we had to slide round each other like doses of mercury. One was a tall middle-aged doctor-ly type, a small middle-aged dumpy medical secretary type who was shuffling papers at a desk in the corner and a tall willowy blonde lady with my ‘jab’ in her hand. She was about half their ages.
She didn’t like me as soon as she laid ‘ears’ on me.
The blonde rolled her eyes so high at my lack of Slovak, that if they had been lasers she would have removed the top of her own skull.
She had a snake-like intensity and I felt like her prey. It was obvious she’d decided it would be great fun to ridicule the white faced immigrant before she skewered him with her skinny glinting needle.
Apparently, I was wasting her time as I tried to hand over my papers to the secretary type – her eyes shot round the inside of her blonde head and back again. When I didn’t sit down quickly enough for her she hissed in barely disguised contempt.
She tapped her foot in agitation as I removed my jacket and rolled up my sleeve … and I watched as she flopped and wobbled her arm like that of a severed puppet at me. But when I did parrot-fashion, thinking that’s what she wanted me to do, she just sneered.
Blondie waited until I wasn’t looking and stabbed me in the arm. And dismissed me.
I never felt a thing.
***
In a small way I had again tasted what it is like to face racism and what it must have felt like to the Slovaks, the Czechs, the Polish and everybody else who ‘invaded’ the UK as a regaled army of fruit pickers and care workers in the 90s.
And as Brexit sails away from British ex-pats like a limping old warship, Europe is revealing itself as an English clone in its distaste for Johnny Foreigner …
They are trying to derail our vaccine roll-out and the Spaniards are clamping down on us by imposing their three month policy.
Before this last lock-down, on our travels down the rolling roads from borderless country to borderless country, Andrea and I were haunted by police in blacked-out BMWs and boy racers in souped-up Skoda Octavias.
And when we got stopped for speeding, the fine almost doubled because we were in our black Bentley look-alike with English number plates.
The four armed-to-the teeth police it took to detain us in a prison of red and white bollards in the fast lane licked their lips at the smell of our cash.
Local cars flashed by at twice the speed we were apparently doing.
But the speed of a corrupt copper’s mind knows no limit eh?
At the Slovenia border, we were made to get out of our car and empty its boot by a pinch-faced sneering spinster border guard with a gun, to show what contraband we were delivering into her country.
Her peevish arrogant gun-toting demands were orchestrated by the full-blown horn section of all the central Europeans who were being stopped from going around their daily business by this inquisitive stick insect in a bullet-proof vest.
But they didn’t have the horn for her, nooo – the cacophony was aimed directly at us.
But she was apoplectic when she found two bars of cannabis chocolate and a bag of non-THC cannabis cookies … the gun itched the sun-parched spider of her hand as she pointed like a sniggering velociraptor at them.
She relented when we showed her the receipt from the official toll-road station souvenir shop in her own country.
So, we were on our way to the sneers and gestures of the locals SHE had held up in the blistering sun.
And why, when we crossed the border in to Croatia, a land desperate to drops its metaphorical skirts and allow the rest of Europe in to its glorious undulating hills and thighs and neatly-trimmed forests and bushes, were we followed by ‘secret police’ in an unmarked van as we went for a lovely day at the seaside?
And why did the taxi driver who took us to dinner confide on the way back home that there were two prices for a trip, a price for locals and a price for British tourists?
But are we being treated any better or worse than we Brits treat the Romanians or the Croats who still come across to the UK looking for a better life?
I think not!
And just maybe we created this atmosphere ourselves … and perhaps we deserve it.
There is a growing climate of anti-tourist sentiment brewing on the continent and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office recently released a list of countries where Britons have been the victims of serious crime.
Yet, there are roughly 2.2 million Eastern European nationals living in the UK, but nobody tells the Polish, Romanian and Lithuanian nationals where they could be in danger.
There were 43,516 knife crime offences in the UK early in 2019, and of course, these crimes were committed, mainly, by our own dispossessed youth, those trapped in tower-blocks that stand sentinel over no-go areas in ALL of our cities.
But in fact all we Johnny Foreigners around Europe want to do is to share what we’ve got, our history, our beauty, our sun our rain our languages, our creativity. We want to become each other – they want the money we can supply for a job well done and we can buy the homes they have abandoned and restore them to their former glory.
“I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours’.
There are approximately 285 thousand British citizens living in Spain, with a further 145 thousand in France and almost 93 thousand in Germany.
But we like modern myths… surveys show Britons think around a quarter of our population are immigrants, when it’s half that, at around 13 per cent.
But it’s not just how many, it’s who these foreigners are that people get wrong.
When asked, people said that immigrants are refugees and asylum seekers yet these are in truth the smallest category of immigrants.
Large proportions think too that immigration increases crime levels, reduces the quality of the NHS and increases unemployment among skilled workers.
This just isn’t true.
The truth is that all we want to do, even if we don’t see it yet, is share our lives, share our cultures, our boots and shoes, walk a mile in each other’s flip-flops, be in each others countries, be friends and distant neighbours.
