"You Say You Want A Revolution"

I can't remember where I was when the Berlin Wall finally 'came down' but I guess I was probably at home on the settee watching the BBC. What I do remember about events that weekend actually occurred on the Monday morning a week after the wall began to come down when a client placed a large piece of the wall on the desk in front of me. I've mentioned this client a few times on this blog over the years in connection with the Zebrugge Ferry disaster and also the Super-Gun trial but on that Monday morning I saw a man with a brain for making a fast buck.

Using his connections at the MOD he had managed to get wind of when and where events were going to unfold and had dispatched one of his staff to Berlin over the weekend when the East German population began to make their move. A week and a bit later and I was staring at this small grey cotton bag and being invited to take a look inside. Inside was something that looked like a piece of breeze block to my untrained eye. He then told me that he planned to have the piece of wall encased in perspex and used as a paperweight, I didn't know whether to say, "Why not?" or just say, "Oh right." The wall after all was a symbol of all that is/was wrong with communism and yet it's collapse brought joy to millions, I did the polite thing when confronted in moments like this and took the coward's way out and left to look for a computer print-out.

When I visited Poland in 1997 the country was awash with U.S money (George Bush senior had visited Krakow the week before me), the shops were full of Western decadence and the red, white and black of the KFC and Pepsi Cola advertising hoardings stood out against the grey Polish sky. Despite the success of Lech Walesa and the incoming tourists, like me curious to take a peek behind the iron curtain, Polish people were still having problems leaving the country. Of course once EU membership was granted they had trouble keeping anybody in the country - although that is slowly changing.

There is still part of the wall standing in Berlin and Checkpoint Charlie has become the ultimate symbol of Western decadence - a tourist trap where you can have your photograph taken with a German student wearing a Russian, British or American soldier's uniform. The watchtowers that guarded the Iron Curtain are still there in come places along the border of the Czech Republic and on the Baltic coast of the old GDR (was there every a country with a more ironic name?).

One day, and hopefully before not too long, I will undertake my long wished for European road trip to see the old Hansiatic towns of Lubeck and Rostock, probably with the Kraftwerk collection as accompaniment, and visit some of the remnants of what became known as the Cold War.

The one person in my family who did have personal experience of the Berlin Wall is my Unlce Geoff who visited the city during the early 1960's whilst still a student. He was with a small group one evening one of whom thought it would be a good idea to throw stones across the wall at one of the watchtowers. What they didn't realise was that the wall wasn't in a straight line all the way round the city, at places there were kinks in it and whilst this helped them hit their target it also meant that the young East German guard could also hit them if he choose to. The guard, obviously not wanting to start a major international incident, fired into the bottom of the wall where the group were standing, resulting in an immediate strategic withdrawal.