Alan Coleman

I was looking around online earlier and came across this great picture of Bernard Hinault and Greg Lemond settling their differences at the top of Alpe d’Huez during the 1986 Tour de France. It’s a defining moment in Tour history, a truly inspiring image and a tribute to the sportsmanship of both riders. The two of them are up there with the people that I admire most in life. Hinault, very much the master at this stage of the relationship, is a picture of joy as the emerging understudy Greg Lemond looks on with admiration and respect. The whole image, Peugeot, Credit Lyonnais, paint on the road and the smiles all combine to give a perfect window into that late 20th century European psyche.

This is often referred to as the Golden Era of cycling, before helmets removed all its personality and drug use became an acceptable fate. Certainly the riders have changed in as much as they all seemed to come in different shapes and sizes, ranging from tiny Columbian climbers like Luis Herrera to enormous Dutch sprinters who attacked the flatlands with relentless force. Maybe attitudes have changed too, sure it was competitive but it wasn’t so much about being the eventual winner as having a couple of glorious moments.

It’s like all these things though isn’t it? It’s the romance of it all, the memories, the sound of Phil Liggett’s exited voice and the feeling of pride as Robert Millar leaves Pedro Delgado behind in the Pyrenees. Cycling isn’t the most skilful sport in terms of individual competitors, but it’s probably the most romantic and certainly the most stylish.

The expression ‘British jobs for British workers’ is quite simply laughable. The biggest hole in the current argument involving contractors at the Lindsey Oil Refinery in North Lincolnshire is that they are not British jobs at all, in fact they are French. French jobs that have been won, fair and square, by an Italian contractor who has every right to employ whoever it wants. Being British does not entitle anyone to work or special treatment within the EU. Again, they are not ‘British Jobs’ and the locality of an employer in relation to ones abode carries with it no obligation. Moreover, the benefits of EU membership has been carrying our economy for years, which is why the comforting and mythical idea of the British job and the British worker is as laughable is it is ludicrous.

When Clement Attlee created the National Coal Board after the war, he did so with no real intention of creating British jobs. It was just assumed that the coal would continue to be mined by the same communities as it always had. So when Margret Thatcher’s Conservative government closed the coal mines in the early 80s, preferring instead to rely on a cheaper imported product, the communities that had done the work previously had a fair claim to a British job. This is where the double standards start to emerge, and it doesn’t take the brains of an English craftsmen to know who is behind it either.

So what we’re really talking about is British jobs for British workers, just as long as it’s economically viable and certain other considerations are taken into account. Oh, and it helps if the media are on your side. Which is why striking miners spent two whole years fighting the media and the Government for real British jobs, and the argument for non British jobs was settled in a week. Shameful.

And since when has the tabloid press been a supporter of the striking worker? The swap from ‘The enemy within’ to ‘The honest working lads’ has been an overnight sensation, literally. The Daily Mail supporting Trade Unionism, who would have thought it? Strange times indeed, or an alternative agenda at play? Given the press and their historical attitude towards industrial action, it’s a little difficult to reconcile the cosy relationship that has developed without pointing to a common denominator. Foreigners.

Amazingly, they do have trades in other countries. Maybe they don’t aspire to the same level of craftsmanship that built our proud empire, but they probably get by with enough skills to build everything the British do, but somehow far better. Further still, we don’t have a problem with foreign children making our trainers in sweatshops for practically nothing do we? The reason being that it suits the economics of our vanity and is somehow justified by being a luxury item. This where the ‘British jobs for British workers’ argument finally crashes and burns.

And please don’t try and tell me that this isn’t a race issue when the idiocy that is the BNP are using it as their latest nationalist soundbite, and they’re not racist are they? Nick Griffin says so. ‘British jobs for British workers’ is a logical progression from ‘Jobs for whites’, only slightly more politically correct. It’s a shame that the working lads couldn’t have made their voice heard without appealing to the current zeitgeist of nationalism in the same manner as the pro Israel lobby.

It’s just all to easy. The flag, the aggressive rhetorical questioning and blatant ugliness of misguided British superiority. Things are changing, and sitting around watching Jeremy Clarkson tell you otherwise only reinforces the underpinning concept of this entire argument. We’re just not the country we used to be.

I’m referring to the state of chaos and confusion that is the country of Greece this week, two before Christmas. It seems that the ignition for this spate of rioting was the shooting of a fifteen year old boy by Police, but I think that the real momentum is probably rooted in more wide ranging issues.  The Greeks have had enough, they’re fed up and pissed off and they’re releasing their anger by rioting in the streets and generally smashing things up. And good luck to them too.

I’ve always said that one of the defining moments for the British people, within my lifetime, was the manner in which we stood up to the Poll Tax (notice I use the word ‘we’ with a sense of pride). The widow learnt her lesson that day, humiliated by a mass disobedience that would end in tears of self pity. The politicians lined up with the usual rhetoric, but by then it’s too late because the damage had been done. Not by thugs or hooligans, but by people who were pushed too far. The reoccurring theme of a smaller group who consider the interests of an even smaller group to be of more importance.

We have to ask ourselves why and when civil disorder became uncivilised, frowned upon by middle aged men in suits and rebranded as thuggish, when the reality is that civil disorder results from people being badly treated.  Also, if it is our wish to smash the place up then why shouldn’t we? After all it does belong to us, we shouldn’t be made to feel as though our habitat has been provided for our use by graceful politicians, only to be handed a good helping of disappointment after we misbehave.

The right wing press poured scorn on protesters who gave a statue of Winston Churchill a green Mohican a few years ago. What happened to our sense of humour? That was a truly funny moment. Besides that, Churchill was a politician which means we have the right to lampoon him in life and death. Further still, it was he that played such a vital part in securing freedom during the Second World War, but he didn’t win the war on his own and even if he did, we still have the right to use that freedom how we choose.

Sometimes I think that peoples idea of democracy is just having things how they want it, or am I missing something?

Civil disorder keeps a country on its toes, it reminds the establishment that they can only have their way most of the time, and it reminds us that we still have some fighting spirit left.

The only problem the world has with civil disorder is there’s not enough of it.

I’ve always had a particular interest in post war communism, and as a child I couldn’t get enough news footage from Red Square, the Politburo and the Berlin Wall. The Soviet Union seemed to have something that I found fascinating, not communism because that was too obvious and oppressive. It was probably the fact that it was so vast, had its own space program, cool posters and backward letters. Also it seemed so much more dignified than its idiot American or British counterparts in Reagan or Thatcher, the latter of which I am still waiting to die.

Also, we couldn’t go there, the forbidden fruit, so to speak. The Moscow satellite states also had a strange lure, and in particular East Germany which seemed even more remote and cut off, even though it was in Europe and we looked over the fence once on a school exchange visit (I snogged Terri Diss, which is slightly strange because she had an 80s Slavic look about her). Most of all it was stories about the Berlin Wall that trapped the imagination, the place that more than any other epitomised cold war paranoia in the 70s and 80s. A divided city, like Belfast was at the time, but with a grown up agenda, and far more at stake.

I’d always wanted to go there, probably more than any other European city. Rome, Barcelona, Paris and Madrid are all places to aspire to, but for me not quite for the same reasons. It’s true to say that those other European cities have seen their fair share of the action in the form of revolution, civil war and air raids. But it was Berlin that sat for forty years, split in two by fearful politics and hopeless ideology from which it still bares the scares. A city rising from the past, slowly coming to terms with the history for which it has become synonymous.

No better place for a stag weekend then? The idea being that the annual beer festival would provide a focus for which to base a few days in the city. Overwhelming amounts of fine lager, barbequed animals and techno awaited. That and poncing about in cafes talking about motorbikes and bullshit sexual conquests.

I can’t put my finger on what I liked about the place most, but I was almost overwhelmed by the sheer civility of the culture and atmosphere. By civility I mean that everything works, is well organized and presented like it matters. Not in the authoritarian way you’d expect in Germany, but in an unregulated manner conclusive to good living. In that sense it is a city completely at ease with its own contradiction.

There are bars everywhere open all hours of the night, they serve good drinks at reasonable prices and the service is impeccable. There is a general good feeling of tolerance about the place, you can smoke, and there’s bog roll in the toilet. The two Techno clubs we went to on Friday and Saturday night respectively draw on the contradicting theme running through the city. The concrete brutalism of the décor, and the abandoned factory locations sit beautifully against the well fitted hard rubber bars and friendly staff. It is insanely modern, almost uncomfortably cool and the music is overtly aggressive, and as if to top the contradiction, it is almost entirely self regulating. Surely this is what it’s all about.

No sign of foul tasting lager, trains littered with filth or hordes of police in oversized Scotchlite pushing you out into the street at bedtime. No, none of that bollocks, and unsurprisingly there was no trouble apart from that threatened by overweight northerners in ‘Man Yoo’ shirts. Looking around the fantastic beer festival at the tens of thousands getting blind drunk in good spirits, I couldn’t help but see us as an increasingly alienated nation, and as time goes on a less physically attractive one too.

And the irony of it all is that nearly 20 years after the end of communism in Berlin, it is the city of London that is turning into a dirty and polarized Police state, with daily violence and hate egged on by a paranoid media.

We have a lot to learn.

I have a new job in the West End, which means I’m great, but also means no more walking through Whitechappel on the way to work. Not that Oxford Circus is anything to rave about but it beats running the gauntlet of Brick Lane at 8.30 every morning.

I don’t know why everyone goes on about it so much, I used to dread those slightly peaky mornings after a bit of a bender, the pavements smeared with the debris of stinking fast food and puddles of gob. Mmm, piles of human phlegm flopping around like uncooked omelette, some of it even spilling out of overflowing wheelie bins. grotesque.

It’s not as if it’s got any particular charm about either, just moody blokes in bad clothes pestering bored tourists into distinctly average restaurants. Apart from that boozer up the side street near where the Seven Stars used to be, it’s a shithole and won’t be missed.

On a more positive note, The B52s. Highly underrated, especially a track called Roam which I think is better than Love Shack, but Mand doesn’t agree. Also, I listened to The Police this evening for the first time in what must be twenty years, and strangely remembered all the words to Everything She Does Is Magic, a fantastic track.

Without meaning to be all nostalgic I recorded it off the old mans vinyl onto a grey TDK C60, I used to listen to it under the covers at night on a pair of massive white ear phones with a curly lead. The steel drums brought it all back, the soundtrack to Industrial unrest, Pershing Missiles and Insignia deodorant.

Great days. It only started to go wrong when I began watching the Nine O’clock news whilst listening to Dark Side Of The Moon on earphones. Then as if from nowhere we discovered the Tour De France on Channel 4, saved if you like, a welcome respite from apartied, Thatcher and the Soviet Union. The Tour has remained a little bit special to me since then – Hainault , Lemond, Roche and the sheer bloody romance of it all.

On Saturday The Tour De France starts in London, and with near on a million people due to turn up, hopefully it’ll be one big European celebration in the worlds best city.