Happy World Book Day… I’ve been turning over a new leaf by re-reading some old favourites from around the world.
Some will be yours, others I’d recommend as they namecheck places you’ll want to visit, and the people too.
Czech’s in post for this classic
On the King Charles Bridge in Prague
Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: Or you can have The Trial.
OK, I’ve not read either, but I have checked out KafkaesquePrague, his home city.
And he’ll be glad to know that the Czechs still retain his take on the world around him and its leaders…
Bureaucracies overpowering people often in a surreal, nightmarish way.
Anne’sterdam
Can I be trusted on a bike? In Amsterdam
Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl: It’s chilling to listen to the audio of Anne‘s words in the diary she wrote in her family’s hideout in Amsterdam.
And I make no apologies in saying that I choked up.
When I heard that the vibrant young girl destined for Auschwitz had wanted to become a journalist.
Anne, of course, made a lasting impression, and has gone on to inspire generations of chlldren and adults alike.
Eastern Eden
Cool for cats… in the Eastern Cape, South Africa
Olive Schreiner’s The Story of An African Farm: Olive may not be on every, or any, schoolchildren’s radar in the Northern Hemisphere.
And athough its style is of its time, the 19th century, this chronicle of South African life in the Eastern Cape, is required reading.
A feminist and ahead of her time Olive railed against the prejudices around her .
And she also moved in some pretty famous circles. Required reading.
Crusoe in Tobago
Give ‘em rope: With Levi and Bandanaman the goat in Tobago
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Tobago: And if you’re lucky enough you can even reprise the actions of some of your favourite literary characters.
Like in Tobago where Robinson Crusoe swept ashore and took years to get off.
For all his protestations I think he probably enjoyed it. And we know that he made some friends of the local goats.
The Odyssey
Spoiled and ruined at the Acropolis in Athens
Homer’s Odyssey: And this one I did read, or at least study, and then parts of it.
As a Classics scholar (or messer) at school.
I had my own odyssey trying to make my way through Munich Airport and on way to Greece and over to its islands.
There’s nothing like walking in the footsteps of your legend’s… so there’s an invitation to you.
And it’s been flagged up that I’ve been down this road before with this book collection. See if my choices have changed and tell me your faves.
And I’ll light a candle in unison for a Happy Hanukah though, in truth, The Scary One and Daddy’s Little Girl have the place looking like a Meatloaf video already.
Hanukah’s status has grown in modern times.
Mainly in North America as part of a better recognition of other cultures and religious observances in December.
So it’s commonplace now, and rightly so, to wish your Jewish friends Happy Hanukah.
Which, in fact, Matisyahu does more tunefully than I ever could, even if I were swollen with sweetened Israeli wine.
Matisyahu’s song touches all the right points, to be fair, King David, Maccabee, Mount Zion, and, of course, candles.
Matisyahu means ‘gift of God’ .
He has, as you might expect from one who terms himself thus, a confidence about himself.
Gift from God
Matthew Miller is actually a Pennsylvanian who is a foremost proponent of Jewish rock, Jewish hip hop and fusion reggae.
We all have our images of Judaism.
And, in truth other than my own home address the place names in The Promised Land’ from the Bible were the most familiar of my childhood.
Anne Frank Statue, Amsterdam
The Jewish story I learned in my early years has infused a lifelong interest in the Chosen People.
Alas that has mostly meant visiting Holocaust markers, Dachau concentration camp on a booze bus trip to Oktoberfest in Munich.
I really should try harder, or even try at all, to get back to church.
That would mean me filling out a form on the net which is as nothing compared with the Mass Rocks of Ireland, the nooks of England and the attic of a canal town house in Amsterdam.
Our forebears whether they were Catholic, Protestant. Muslim or Jew, or any other belief would go to greater lengths than we do now to practise their faith.
Fit for my queen
We all know about how Anne Frank and her family and friends lived in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
And it is truly humbling to hear the words from her diary spoken as you walk through the confines of their attic retreat.
That truly does put our own lockdowns into perspective.
That’s the Lord of the Attic Museum the ‘Our Dear Lord in the Attic’ built in 1663 when Catholics lost their right to worship in their own way.
Genke will show you around the Dylan
You’ll have a lot more room, and comfort. in George and Amal’s favourite Dutch billet, The Dylan Amsterdam.the Keizersgracht, one of the city’s most famous canals in the stylish Nine Streets shopping district.
Where, of course, their peerless personal service, will ensure you know everywhere to go in Amsterdam, from brown cafe to Sunday chapel.
Doubles start from €223 per night including breakfast.
Fit for yer man, the President
A sign of the times that the most bombed hotel in the world was now hosting the most important couple in the world of the times, the Clintons.
The Europa Hotel also entertained another stellar group, the Republic of Ireland’s finest journalists, to see a Van Morrison and Joey DeFrancesco jazz cabaret.
The Europa.
The Europa is undergoing an extensive refurb of its bedrooms to be completed by March.
Of course, the staff can’t be improved on, and they’re always there to clean up after you… when you leave your room like a bomb-site, as I do.
All llamas great and small
If like me you’ve been enchanted by the new version of All Creatures Great and Small on the telly you’ll be warning to seek out the Yorkshire Dales in England.
For those who don’t know the story it’s the real life tale of how a Scots vet won over the suspicious people of ‘God’s Own County’.
Let me remind you of a particularly humorous incident sees James Herriott lose his watch up a cow’s bum.
But they’re certainly there now. The Nidderdale Llamas experience offers treks through the farm in the company of llamas and alpacas.
All joking aside about Zlatan ‘The Ego’ Ibramovich being cut down to size.
But is it right that the Sweden soccer superstar should befall the same fate as Edward Colston in Bristol, Lord Nelson in Dublin and Saddam Hussein in Baghdad?
A little big woman: Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi
Sometimes it’s the design that catches you and stops you in your tracks.
And so it is with this remarkable little woman,
The President of the USA, Lydon Baines, Johnson took extraordinary measures in stopping her saying her piece at the Democratic Convention by having television change its schedule.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s life was extraordinary, born into a sharecropping family and picking cotton from the age of six, she was later forced out of her home, threatened with her very life and beaten.
All because she wanted to sign on on the voting register.
She summed up her struggle in the Civil Rights Movement thus, and of course nobody could say it better: ‘I got sick and tired of being sick and tired.’
Us journalists like to think of ourselves as hard-bitten but I had to choke back the tears walking through the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam…. http://www.annefrank.org.
The audio narrative dwelt on a passage in her diary where she mentions that she wants to become a journalist when she’s older.
And what a journalist she would have been… ethical (yes, some of us are), prying and fearless.
Amsterdam is one of the world’s great cities and Anne one of history’s greatest figures… http://www.iamsterdam.com.
Statues should be provocative and the Czechs have this one down to a T.
‘Piss’ is the good people of Prague’s commentary on the politicians who have urinated all over their country.
You’ll not see it here but once the water gets flowing they pee all over the map of the country.
The Czechs as well as being the world’s biggest lager drinkers, per population, with some of the world’s best beers, are wonderfully anti-establishmentarian.
The boys are back in town: With my old pal Paul in Dublin
There are statues to musical giants all over the world but while former Thin Lizzy lead singer Phil Lynott isn’t the best or most famous singer of them all, try telling that to Dubliners.
It is a tradition now for visitors to Dublin to have their photo taken outside Philo’s statue off the main Grafton Street shopping thoroughfare.
That other statue, the Tart with the Cart, Molly Malone? Well you can leave that to the uninitiated.
He’s obviously not the only Horatio or the biggest, and as I’ve alluded to already some not too far from here even blew him up.
But he was a survivor, except when he was killed obvs, and he lost an eye and an arm.
Death might even have been a better gig too as he was transported home in a vat of rum… a good way to go and one that the Bajans would have approved of.
Until, of course, his old shipmates drilled a hole in the vat and drunk the rum!
Statues are a controversial subject but my Bajan hosts were keen to tell me that Nelson was part of their story too.
And so ignore the white liberals who like to speak for black people, they’re glad to have him keeping his one eye open on what’s going on in Bim.
Martin Luther stood as a defiant symbol of Dresdeners refusal to see their city disappear after the Allies’ firebombing at the end of the Second World War.
The Dresdeners rebuilt the obliterated Frauenkirche sixty years later, after they had got rid of the Communists.
Using as the plans photographs they had asked the public to send in from their weddings.
Dresden was known as the Florence of the Elbe and it is one of the great architectural stories of our age, or any age, to see how the Dresdeners have rebuilt their city to the same grandeur of its renaissance days.
Yes, the Little Mermaid is more visited, but personally I prefer the top-hatted Hans in the heart of Copenhagen.
Hans was an eccentric all right and once decamped on Charles Dickens, walked around the house in the starkers, and made it difficult for Charlie to show him the door.
Nelson Mandela Voting Line, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
March to Freedom: In Port Elizabeth
Statues shouldn’t just stand there. No, really. And this is a moving symbolic Voting Line which sums up South African democracy.
This is our host Sisseko and beside him a kid as he would have been back in 1995 when South Africa had its historic vote.
It is also immersive and you don’t have to climb up a plinth to get next to it as they do in Glasgow when they put police cones on the Duke of Wellington.
It is the way I should imagine that Nelson, a native of the Eastern Cape, would have wanted it.
Anne Frank, Amsterdam: ‘Nothing is off limits,’ a former newspaper colleague chimed in when I tried to steer morning conference back from an insensitive area.
And a lot of journalists like to paint themselves as hard-bitten and cynical… as if detaching yourself from feeling will help you present the story!!!
The words of the young Anne from her diary of life i. Hiding in an Amsterdam attic and her idealistic dream that she might one day become a journalist choked me.
Judy Murray, Quinta do Lago, Portugal: Now, I wouldn’t swap my Irish mum for anybody but if I had had a Scottish mum I’d have wanted her to be Judy Murray.
Of course that would age her and Judy, as well as being as athletic as a teenager she is also just as mischievous.
The tennis coach was quick to say that we weren’t to ask about her famous sons Andy and Judy…
Marilyn Monroe, Los Angeles: Who wouldn’t have wanted to lie with Marilyn.., though maybe not now.
Although Hugh Hefner had no such qualms (funny that) and bought the drawer next to Marilyn Monroe in Los Angeles so he could rest with her in perpetuity.
On this the 75th anniversary year of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, where Anne and her sister Margot died, and Auschwitz were liberated, pay tribute…
