Sunday 7 July 2013

The end of the Berlin Wall

Today dated Saturday November 11th 1989
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For many years I didn’t realise that Berlin was actually 100 miles inside East Germany and thought that the Wall was just part of the East/West border. Actually its 96-mile length encircled West Berlin while the 866-mile border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran from the Baltic Sea in the North to Czechoslovakia in the South. This border had been closed in 1952 and by 1960 the East German government had realised that the Berlin road and subway access to the West was a gap through which more and more of their citizens were ‘escaping’, so the work on building the Berlin Wall started in 1961.
In the summer of 1989 thirteen thousand East Germans fled across the open borders between Hungary and Austria to West Germany. In September the leadership of the Social Unity Party that ran the GDR started to give in under pressure from a growing protest movement and on November 9th 1989, the government relaxed travel regulations and allowed East Germans to cross directly from East to West Berlin. When hundreds of thousands of people gathered at the checkpoints in the Wall later that day and demanded to be let through, the leadership was unable to withstand the pressure, and the Berlin Wall was opened.
Over the following days the Wall was ‘occupied’ by both East and West Berliners and was breached in several places both unofficially and officially to create new crossings. The total demolition of the Wall followed in June 1990 and the reunification of Germany followed on October 3rd 1990.

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Oops. Apparently the mistake cost about £180,000 in printing costs. I wonder if anyone kept one from being burnt. It would probably be worth a bob or two to a collector.

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I think there may be a printing error here – ‘£179.6’ – for what, a litre? A gallon? A tanker full? According to www.theaa.com the price in 1989 was about 185.8 new pence per gallon, so I reckon the above should read £1:79.6p a gallon or 39.5p a litre.

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The final paragraph of this article about Myodil is typical of the response from a big company like Glaxo – “we did warn you in the leaflet”. Who, when about to be injected by a nurse in prep for an X-ray asks to read the leaflet that was supplied with whatever is being administered? 

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What’s acid house music? Apparently it’s a variant of house music characterized by the use of simple tone generators with tempo-controlled resonant filters primarily using bass-line synthesisers and a drum track. It originated in Chicago and arrived in England in the late 1980’s. The word ‘acid’ doesn’t refer to LSD. Quite what it does refer to I can’t work out. The drug choice of Acid House fans was Ecstasy and it was the media fuelled moral panic over the use of this drug that led to the police raids and arrests of party organizers like Robert Darby.  Doncha just love it when someone in their late 60’s tries to explain youth culture? Almost as bad as some spotty TV presenter who was born this side of 1990 trying to tell us what it was like to live through the 1960’s.

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Maureen Lipman’s Beattie in the British Telecom (get it? Beattie – BT – British Telecom) adverts was for a while one of the most popular characters on TV and as instantly recognisable as Alexander the meerkat is now.

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An odd competition – win a house but, by the way, you’ll have to sell your own home to make up the £66,000 shortfall on the purchase price.

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The TV viewing charts and predictably the top 10 programmes by viewing numbers are all soaps. ‘Naked Video’ was not what it sounds like – this was the comedy sketch show that gave us Gregor Fisher’s Rab C Nesbitt and, my favourite, John Sparkes’ Welsh poet Siadwel.

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The puppet based satire show Spitting Image ran for 19 seasons between 1984 and 1996 and featured the voices of such household names as Steve Coogan, Alistair McGowan, John Thomson, Jan Ravens, Harry Enfield, Enn Reitel, Hugh Dennis, Phil Cornwell, Jon Culshaw, John Sessions, Phil Cool, Rory Bremner and Pamela Stephenson.

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Regular readers of this blog will realise that it isn’t the exploits of David Bryant or an interest in bowls but the drawing that attracted me to this item.

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