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.
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.
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.
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.
Watch therefore for ye know neither the.day nor the hour that the Son of Man cometh – Matthew 25
Ignoring that this is the Parable of the Ten Virgins and that it deals with how prepared or otherwise they were to serve the bridegroom.
But there is a message here about preparedness and the buzz phrase ‘stay alert’ and, scholar that he is, I’m sure Boris Johnson would know of the passage’s significance.
Though, of course we could never see Martin Luther in his pomp now but you couldn’t help but get a sense of the man in Saxony.
And there is a preacher at Luther’s church, the Frauenkirche in Dresden worthy of his famous predecessor.
As he recalled his own father taking him to the ruins of the church where only the statue of Luther still stood and vowed that one day it would be rebuilt.
His near namesake is all over Washington where his statue remains unfinished in homage to the unfinished struggle.
While in Memphis https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org his last resting place The Promised Land the Civil Rights Tourist will want to take in the Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters) in Memphis, Tennessee.
I’ve always hung on the words of the old because they’ve got more, not less, life than the rest of us, and that is even more so abroad.
Where the elderly retain more respect than we give our senior citizens in the Ooo K.
And so as the UK wrestles with what to do with its Seventysomethings – and locking them away at home is being proposed…
Here are some of the older people who this energetic 54-year-old struggles to keep up with.
The Tobago touche
Auntie Ali and Uncle Kenneth: Tobagonians have more uncles and aunties than the rest of us on account that everyone who is old is… it’s a form of respect.
Auntie Ali and Uncle Kenneth run the Blue Crab in Robinson, Scarborough where Ali wiggles her bum-bum and Uncle Kenneth (and me) make the chicken curry.
Geraldine and Betsy; The American sitcom King of Queens has Carrie’s pal Holly walk Arthur… for us itat Club Barbados it was Angelaaround the Platinum Coast.
That’s me and Betsy from the Virginia Ski Club of America.
Czech your stride, Prague: I’m just getting feeling back in my legs after My guide had walked the bones off me and my colleague Elise in Prague.
She also had a typically Americanised and underplayed way of describing those who had left a trail of destruction through her city… Stalin, for example, was a ‘bad guy’.
We all of us heard about the world, saw the world or were told about the world before we ever saw it… and for many of us we fell in love with the world through books.
I’m not talking about the holiday page-turners where Major Jeremy or Lord Montgomery crosses the class divide to elevate Mary the chambermaid.
A novel travel experience
Rather these are the books which mark out a country as somewhere we strive to visit and then do so:
The Story of an African farm girl (South Africa): Olive Schreiner unsurprisingly wasn’t on my school syllabus growing up in Scotland in the Seventies.
South Africa was completely off my radar until my best friend Thomas was taken out there to live with his family.
Thomas was addicted to the Commando wartime comics from the DC Thomson stable which includes the Beano and the Dandy, and who I am working for now.
But I digress. Olive, as I discovered on my trip to the Karoo in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, was a feminist pioneer.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (USA): Arguably one of the most influential books in the history of the modern world
With Abraham Lincoln purportedly greeting Harriet Beacher Stowe with the salutation: ‘So this is the little woman who started this great (American Civil) war.’
Tom was based on a real-life slave, Josiah Henson who lived and worked on a plantation in Bethesda, Maryland.
Much changed and much gentrified as an exclusive suburb of Washington DC where I always receive the best of welcomes from my cousin… www.washington.org and Easy DC.
Slaughterhouse–Five(Dresden, Germany): War revisionism hadn’t reached my Glasgow school but Kurt Vonnegut seeped into my consciousness a few years later at Aberdeen University.
The cult Sixties novelist placed his time-travelling hero Billy Pilgrim in and around the Allies’ firebombing of Dresden
Then there’s Stefanie Hempell’s Early Beatles-Tour, her infectious smile, Der Fab Four anecdotes and songs on her ukulele… http://www.hempels-musictour.de
Bergen: The old wharf and traditional Norwegianbuildings of Bryggen where you can alwaysfind a wooden (or real) troll.
The Floyen mountain with funicular and breathtaking views of the fjord and your ship.
And the Kode museum http://www.kodebergen.no with its Munch and Dahl (the landscape artist whose paintings drew the first 19th century cruises) exhibitions.
Symbols have always been at the very heart of sport:
The colours and designs of strips or uniforms, club badges or crests and buttons.
Although sometimes they can land you in trouble.
And the players in the Celtic and Rangers Catholic and Protestant divide know it.
Whether they grew up in the West of Scotland or bought into it.
Mo Johnston controversially crossed the divide and himself (well at least when he was at Celtic, the Catholic gesture particularly provocative to Rangers fans).
While Paul Gascoigne gullibly responded to the egging-on from Rangers fans by mocking a flute player.
Another incendiary action in Glasgow’s religious tribalism, conjuring up the Protestant King William of Orange’s victory over the Catholic King James II.
That flute is OK
Sometimes even the football forces its way into the argument.
The debate du jour in English football is whether players and teams should walk off if they are racially abused from the crowd.
I never had to encounter being either physically or verbally abused over the colour of my skin.
But I was spat at on a bus by religious bigots in Glasgow as a child because of the colour of my uniform.
Which is why I was so drawn to Rosa Parks’ sit-down protest on the bus in the Deep South.
And was so humbled by the sacrifices made by black (and white) Civil Rights protesters.
No such discussion is had regarding religious bigotry in Glasgow despite they’re being on average one murder surrounding the Old Firm game every time the two meet.
