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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