Delight

So there we were at the local pub on a Friday night - me and Shirley and a hundred Sheffield Wednesday supporters. Historically, Hull City are dwarves, minnows, nobodies compared with the legendary Sheffield Wednesday - The Owls. Oh jeez - toowhit-toowhoo! After three minutes they had a penalty - taken by Deon Burton who was the very player who had just handled the ball when he rose with our new defender - Danny Mills in the penalty area. It was as clear as crystal on the TV.

Oh no! But then within fourteen minutes we were ahead with two excellent opportunist goals from The Beast - Jon Parkin. Oh the second one! When he swerved and cracked it in across their nancy-boy keeper, it was better than a torrid night with Ulrika Johnson. All of this was on live television which had previously only witnessed Hull City defeats.

Funny how the corners of my mouth kept arching upwards afterwards. I was as happy as a sandboy. As Gary left the pub, I called to him - "It's not the winning that's important, it's the taking part!" And our battleaxe landlady - Janet Turner - a staunch Wednesday supporter agreed that Hull City had deserved their victory.

Oh sweet! That's the right way to begin a weekend! We were in the pub for four solid hours and after several pints I'm back here at this keyboard sharing my delight with you! Up The Tigers! And by the way Steve - "Occupied Country" - Danny Mills really enjoyed himself and made a manly contribution to the evening's events.

Remembering

New York is such a fantastic city. It belongs to America but in some ways it belongs to the rest of the world too. It looks out towards Europe from where so many immigrants came with their ragged bundles and their stories. And in the Twin Towers that fateful morn, there weren't just American workers, there were people from all over the world including many from the UK. It was after all The WORLD Trade Centre, not the American Trade Centre. And there were Muslims and Jews and blacks and Hispanics, believers and non-believers. The inhuman fools who made their cruel assault on the Twin Towers were attacking all who believe in decency, kindness, goodness and a brighter tomorrow. There can be no justification for what they did. This wasn't Islam it was pure, unbridled evil. If there were a God we might ask him to allow the 2793 who died that day to rest in peace and bring comfort to their loved ones - still grieving five years on. Three years ago I walked by Ground Zero and noticed some graffiti on the security fence - "Hey Pat! We miss ya! Let me know if they got beer in heaven!" I'm afraid I wept.

Gnome

Burglars? Muggers? Car thieves? Fraudsters? Not Devon and Cornwall Police. Apparently they'd rather hassle citizens who have solar-illuminating gnome policemen in their gardens. Okay, between the lines there's obviously been some neighbourly disagreement/animosity but I don't think that gives the cops a right to abuse their authority in order to back up a colleague who has an axe to grind. What I'd now like to see in that garden is a whole army of solar policemen!

ARREST THREAT OVER POLICE GNOME

(BBC News Website Sept 10th 2006)

Police have taken a dim view of a man's glowing garden gnome and threatened him with arrest unless he removes it.
The solar-powered policeman figure stands sentinel in the garden of Gordon MacKillop's home in Treovis, near Liskeard.
His neighbour, former policeman John McLean, says the gnome is annoying and upsets buyers viewing his home.
Now police have served Mr MacKillop with a notice for "placing a garden gnome with intent to cause harassment".

Mr MacKillop, 46, was woken in the night by two officers who warned him that the gnome was offensive to his neighbours.
The notice, under the Protection From Harassment Act 1997, also accuses Mr MacKillop of intimidating potential buyers of Mr McLean's £209,000 cottage.
Mr McLean has told officers that the garden gnome, which comes complete with police dog and solar light, was in an "annoying position".

Mr MacKillop denied having harassed house-hunters viewing his neighbour's property.
Mr MacKillop, a marine surveyor at Devonport Dockyard, said: "When you hear a knock at the door at quarter to midnight you don't expect to be served with that.
"I was absolutely fuming. I thought there had been an accident in the family."
Mr MacKillop said he bought the gnome to deter criminals, after his motorcycle was stolen from his drive.
"It just happened that it had a police uniform on," he said.
"I'm not having the police telling me what type of garden gnome I can have in my garden.
"This is a standard gnome I bought from a retail store. If they are considered to be harassing they should be withdrawn from sale."
A Devon and Cornwall Police spokeswoman said: "This isn't just a petty issue. This has been ongoing for two or three years."
Mr McLean was unavailable for comment.

Berlin

And then there was Berlin itself - a spacious city which is still re-inventing itself. There's so much construction there. Where once there was a barren no-man's land beyond the Brandenburg Gate, now there are glassy banks, the French Embassy and a spanking new American Embassy being put up right next to the famous gate which overlooks the Tiergarten - a vast inner city park with leafy bowers and gargling streams, sweet meadows and paths that wind towards the cooing of turtle doves.

It seems that most of the old eighteenth/nineteenth century centre of Berlin used to lie behind the wall in "The East". My hotel, the Ansbach, was in "The West" near to the Zoo and the vast Ka De We department store. My room overlooked the Mercedes Building which was crowned with a slowly spinning Mercedes symbol - illuminated at night - somehow reminding me of other symbols that had shone over this city in the middle of the last century.

Perhaps visitors should really be looking forward but some of the time I was of course looking back - at the bullet holes and war scars on badly restored municipal columns and at the car park that sits over the hidden ruins of Hitler's bunker - where he died with his new bride as Russian troops rampaged through the city. Not far from this unremarkable site, I wandered through Berlin's latest monument to the Holocaust - designed by Peter Eisenman - hundreds of concrete blocks of varying heights - arranged in a symmetrical maze without commentary. They leave you asking "Why?" and they remind you of gravestones. You're drawn into them till you don't know where you are and the blocks are dwarfing you.

I found Berlin's train service confusing with its U-Bahn and S-Bahn lines. I never was sure I'd bought the right ticket though nobody ever checked. I visited the Pergamon Museum with its many architectural artefacts ripped off from the ancient world - mostly in the nineteenth century. What were those people thinking? Perhaps in an age when travelling abroad was most uncommon, this was the only way they could think of to enlighten stay-at-home people about what was out there in the wider world. More enjoyable for me was the modern art gallery in the old Hamburger Station with several key works by Andy Warhol.

Apparently, JFK's famous line "Ich bin ein Berliner" was famously grammatically incorrect. Rather than it meaning the intended "I am a citizen of Berlin", a better translation would be "I am a jelly doughnut"... I kid you not!

Sachsenhausen

Back from Berlin, I suspect that the memory that will endure when all the others have been washed away, is my trip to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp some twenty five miles north of the city near the town of Oranienburg. There was so much to learn, so much to read, so many pictures to study and testaments to listen to as well as imbuing the atmosphere of such a vast historical site.

Camp gate - "Work makes you free"

Before the summer of 1933, the area was just pine forest but as the National Socialists identified their perceived enemies, they needed somewhere to put them out of sight and out of mind. And so Sachsenhausen was conceived. At first it gathered in fellow Germans - socialists, communists, dissenters, criminals and these unfortunate men worked under duress to build the vast concentration camp with its many barrack huts, its concrete walls, drains, laundry, infirmary, industrial site, officers' houses, kitchens.

The thing snowballed as the Nazi machine rolled on. The camp became an invaluable training centre for the SS. In 1937, foreign visitors saw the gardens and some clean-shaven orderly prisoners but they didn't see the beatings or the shootings, the hunger, squalor or the unadulterated injustice of the place. Hangings, shootings, kickings increased to a point where ovens were required to reduce hundreds then thousands of human bodies to ash.

Gipsies were exterminated here, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, religious dissenters, trade unionists, academics and then of course the Jews who were often rolled straight on in to the camp, unloaded and killed with few of the longterm prisoners realising what was going on. Some of the ashes of these poor people were used as road building material. Prisoners with tattoos would often meet death prematurely so that their skin could be used for amusement - sometimes in lampshades.

I saw the mortuary and the evil autopsy slabs near the site of the brothel where specially drafted-in female prisoners were nourished, sometimes sun-lamped, dressed in finery and then systematically abused in a corridor of cell-like rooms. At least one was murdered for becoming pregnant. The most trusted senior prisoners could earn coupons to visit the brothel - it was seen as a way of making them more co-operative and productive.

The decaying remains of the SS officers' wooden mess

In the "New Museum" I saw a photograph from the camp commandant's special collection of an emaciated but very tall prisoner and a dwarf prisoner. For the commandant's amusement, these two men were instructed that they must always be together - at ablutions, on the parade ground, in the barrack room, everywhere, No one knows what happened to these men or indeed who they were or where they were from. They wore numbers like the rest.

In 1961, the East German government held a huge memorial service on the site and a vast column and statue were erected in memory of the 100,00+ who had perished at Sachsenhausen. The site does make the point very firmly that after the second world war, it continued to be a concentration camp run by the Soviet army. They rounded up Nazis, suspected Nazis and sympathisers and for a couple of years things seemed little different from how they had been during the Third Reich. Many died.

The monument erected by the DDR in 1961.

It makes you feel so humble, so grateful, so ashamed, so quiet, so small to visit a place like Sachsenhausen. The evil is still amongst us. It never went away. There under leaden skies which mercifully didn't spill their rain, I may have felt the spirit both of the frightened skeletal men and their jackbooted captors with their warped philosophies and their ice-cold hearts. There is so much else to be said about this grim place but to the hundred thousand gone I say - may you rest in peace and may your deathbells ring out through the centuries ahead as a warning to those who would again take civilisation into darkness.

The outer section where "special" prisoners were housed.

£200

Every Sunday I go to the quiz at our local pub. There's a prize kitty. It sits in a safe and to win it you have to guess the code. There are two hundred numbers to pick from and each week the kitty builds up. Tonight, I had a winning line on my Bingo-like quiz sheet, so I went up to the bar fully intending to opt for the £10 winner's prize and forfeiting my chance to go for the safe. But the quizmaster - Leeds Mick - was persuasive and reluctantly I chose to try the safe. On the sheet, there were all these crossed out numbers staring back at me, but the number 136 was sitting on its own. I went for it. Leeds Mick tapped in the numbers and lo and behold - I won! How much? Two hundred quid - that's all! Two hundred f-ing notes! Yo! But as I always sit with Roy and Mike, I had to split it three ways and then there was ten quid for Neil and Dave's table to get some drinks and ten for Richard, Stan and Gibby - leaving me with £60 to bring home. Holy Mother of God! Such moments are rare. It almost made up for seeing Hull City unluckily lose their third home match of the season against a dull Coventry team, 1-0. This sixty quid will come in very handy when I jet off to Berlin on Tuesday - I might keep it to spend on a brilliant German meal of sausages and sauerkraut with black bread and a stein of Munchen beer. Some people are losers but tonight, I'm a winner! Autographs later! TWO HUNDRED! Yaaaaay!

Sexism

This is where tumbleweed rolls quietly through a deserted street while an eerie wind wails in the distance. Yes folks it's joketime! And to begin with here are some jokes about women - don't worry for the sake of political correctness, jokes about men will follow....
Why do only 10% of women go to heaven? Because if all of them went it would be hell.
How many men does it take to open a bottle of beer? None. It should be open by the time the little lady brings it.
Why do women have smaller feet than men? It's one of those "evolutionary things" that allows them to stand closer to the kitchen sink.
How do you know when a woman is about to say something really clever? When she starts her sentence with "A man once told me.."
How do you repair a woman's watch? You don't need to. There is a clock on the oven.
Why do men fart more than women? Because women can't shut up long enough to build up the required pressure.
What's worse than a Male Chauvinist Pig? A woman who won't do what she's told.
Scientists have discovered a food that diminishes a woman's sex drive by 95%.It's called a Wedding Cake.
In the beginning, God created the earth and rested. Then God created Man and rested. Then God created Woman. Since then, neither God nor Man has rested.

Now here's the promised jokes about men...
One day God called Adam to him and said: "Adam, I have some good news and some bad news. Which would you like to hear first?""The good news," replied Adam."Well, the good news is I gave you a penis and a brain.""OK.." said Adam warily. "And what's the bad news?""I only gave you enough blood to operate one at time."
What do men and tights have in common? They're both apt to cling, run, and never fit properly between your legs.
Why is psychoanalysis so much quicker for men than for women? Men don't need to be regressed back to their childhood.
What do you call a man with only half a brain? Gifted.
Why does it take three million sperm to fertilize one single egg? Because they're too stupid to ask for directions.
Why is it so difficult for women to pick up men who are sensitive, caring and good looking? They're all gay
What do you call a woman who knows where her husband is every night? A widow.

Although I have pasted in the above for mild amusement, I have to say that this man-woman divide is all utter bullshit in my view. We're people trying to get by, trying to be happy, trying to make it to next year. Some people talk about the other sex in a manner which is reminiscent of racist ignorance - "Men! They can't multitask!" - "Women! They're always changing their minds!". It's all bullshit and everybody is different. No two men are the same and no two women are the same. As I write this I'm on the phone, drinking coffee and stroking the cat and I'm not thinking about that one thing that men allegedly always have on their minds... well I wasn't until I wrote that!