We went to Bali, saw God and Dali
So mystic, surrealistic...
Queen, 'Was It All Worth
It?' (The Miracle)
The first four
pieces on this page were written in
July/August/September 2004:
Radio
Ga Ga - Lost in Translation? - Some
words about language
Under
Pressure - China and Its Changes - My
time in China as a student and some updates
Hammer
to Fall - The German Connection - Studying
in East Germany, working in the united Germany
46664
- Invincible Hope - About
the Cape Town concert and the Latino concert that never
was....
The
rest are dated.
*Radio
Ga Ga - Lost in translation?
As
a linguist, I take a natural interest in words. When you
think about it, we may translate our thoughts and
feelings into words, music or art, which other people in
turn translate back into their own thoughts and
feelings. The creator may find that the creation takes
on a different nuance of meaning for the audience to
that which he or she originally intended, but no matter.
There
has been some discussion on Brian's official site about
the translation of Queen lyrics for the musical - mainly
concerning Spanish so far, but some correspondence
earlier this year (Letters, February 28 and 29/04)
suggesting a hilarious possibility for the translation
of part of Bo Rhap into German (the musical arrives in
Cologne in December) has kept the issue alive. As a
fluent German speaker I can understand the problem here,
but I still like the idea of WIR WERDEN DICH ROCKEN!
*'Radio
Ga Ga' was released in 1984 accompanied by a video
containing clips from the late 1920s Fritz Lang film
'Metropolis' which were purchased from the German
government. No chance of a 'lost in translation' here -
it's a silent movie! (Click here
to read more about Queen's international appeal).
Under
Pressure - China and Its Changes
China
is now changing rapidly, but I was there as it made its first
tentative steps into a new history...
People on
Streets..
(Under Pressure) Queen/David Bowie
From Autumn 1981 to Summer 1982 I was
studying in Shanghai, China as part of my course at Leeds
University. It certainly had quite an impact on me to go
somewhere so different at such a formative age - nineteen. It
was an exciting time to go as China had not long started an
'Open Door Policy', opening up to the west after many years of
isolation. The effects of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76),
were still being felt. To cut a long story short, that time was
marked by stifling of artistic expression of anything other than
praise of Chairman Mao, and the education of many was affected
when young people were sent to the countryside to work alongside
peasants. We are therefore not only talking about a
significantly different culture, but a radically different
political system, demographic legacy and retarded infrastructure
and development. The latter was the reason why one had the
feeling, on arriving in Shanghai in the autumn of 1981, of going
back in time - maybe even as much as three decades or more in
some respects. This was accentuated by the history of Shanghai
itself - it had been annexed by the British and French in the
1930s and the centre of the city is still largely made up of
European-style buildings and streets dating from this time -
ironically, much of this architecture was destroyed in Europe
itself during World War II. In some places, this dating applied
to the internal decor as well. Inside the Jinjiang club
(unfortunately no longer existing in that form) for example, one
expected to see Humphrey Bogart emerging from behind the
splendid red curtains at any moment!
The first thing to learn about China is
that its greatest resource is people - masses of them. Imagine
something ten times worse than Oxford Street on a crowded
Saturday in a tourist season, and there you have the Nanjing
Road in Shanghai on any day of the week. Things are changing in
China now, and a 'one child policy' is steadying population
growth. But in those days, in order to maintain full employment,
there were often half a dozen people doing a job where one would
have done. This could also account for some of the stifling
bureaucracy I encountered - I likened it to a very heavy lump of
ice sitting on top of the stream of Chinese civilisation,
stopping it from flowing unless there was a means by which it
could seep through. I often wondered if the concept of 'Chinese
Whispers' came from an observation of the number of people who
could handle one transaction in this society. For example,
drawing money from the bank involved the passing of my bank book
and various slips of paper round a ring of four people - one of
whom was at the end of a mini 'washing line', to which the
documentation was clipped then shunted down to her. Furthermore,
if you didn't time your banking carefully, you would be further
delayed, when, at a certain point in the afternoon, exercise
music would be played and all the clerks stopped work
immediately to do physical jerks. One of the features of Chinese
life was a set of stipulations that seemed to govern just about
every area of existence called 'gui-ding'. This word cannot be
translated into English because one does not encounter such a
wide-ranging set of rules in a freer society.
Despite a definite intention to open up and
progress, there were still elements in the Chinese government
which were quite paranoid about western influence, especially on
the young. Just one example of this was that we were able to
pick up the BBC World Service Radio but, when the chart was
being broadcast, the signal faded and returned again afterwards,
indicating that it was being deliberately blocked*. It was
therefore impossible to keep up with the latest sounds back
home, but one of my fellow-students had a cassette tape sent to
her and this is how, late in 1981, we got to hear the newly
released Queen/David Bowie collaboration 'Under Pressure'.
Familiar voices therefore reached us from back home - an
extraordinary song in this (for us) extraordinary place. We used
the tape for our own mini disco, and a few Chinese were able to
be there. This may have been one of the very first occasions
that members of the most populous nation in the world had had
the chance to hear a Queen song. But as the group were very big
in Japan right from the seventies, an earlier invasion might
have occurred from there - China's industrialised neighbour was
'first in' when things had started to change. You wouldn't
believe it now, but there was hardly any advertising then. Such
as there was, most of it was done by Japanese companies - a neon
sign displaying 'Sanyo' was memorable because of its solitary
central position, flashing away near the Huangpu river. (Or
Huang-pooh - it really stank. I really don't know what they put
in the rivers. I would love to have bottled some of the smells
and bring them home for sampling and analysis. You probably
would have found more chemicals than Lister had in his
laboratory).
I
want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike - (Bicycle Race)
Freddie Mercury
Getting around as a
student in early eighties China was usually done by bike. You
had to be careful, though. It was just about everybody else's
form of transport as well. If it wasn't for the other cyclists,
sometimes transporting rear trailers with cargo as bizarre as
cages of chickens, there were also some weird little
three-wheeled cars, toy versions of Reliant Robins, darting out
of side streets - your 180°
reflexes had to be pretty sharp - and cable cars. These
were particularly cumbersome. No wonder the slang expression 'chou
bianzi' - to come off the overhead wires - was a metaphor for
death.
The food was great and Chinese
hospitality second to none. Many Chinese were keen to practise
English, the learning of which was being encouraged, so there
was no problem getting into conversation with Chinese people and
visiting their homes. Also, I got to travel to many of this
country's most interesting places, such as Beijing, the Great
Wall, the terracotta soldiers at Xian, right up to the north
west where the Turkish-looking Uighurs and Kazakhs (among
others) lived in oases in the Gobi desert. Also memorable were
natural wonders; the Stone Forest at Kunming and the mountains
of Guilin, of the type seen in classical Chinese paintings.
Shanghai
was certainly a lively place by the standards of the time.
However, as people there were still very unused to westerners,
you would attract a curious crowd if you stopped on the street.
They would gather round you, and just stand and stare, as if you
had arrived from another planet. If I started to speak to them
in their own language, several jaws would drop on the
realisation that the intergalactic alien could speak Chinese!
I
returned to China on a visit in 1995, taking my daughter, then
three years old. I was able to visit my former room-mate from my
days studying at Fudan University. I scarcely recognised
Shanghai – the centre was fairly unchanging, but I couldn’t
find my way round some parts of it from my previous memory.
Most notably, the area known as Pudong - across the river
from 'Wai Tan' (or the 'Bund'), which was previously a
large cabbage patch, had now developed into a financial district
with a TV Tower. There is so much more private enterprise -
progress along the capitalist road continues apace. This may be
accompanied to a much lesser and slower degree by ever more
significant political changes, but there is also a fine line to
tread to maintain stability. Very recently, the government has
started to make pronouncements about the violent clamp-down on
the peaceful protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989,
indicating for the first time that mistakes were made. Many
Chinese now study abroad and worldwide communications are such
that censorship is becoming ever more difficult. The Chinese are
not just enterprising in business - I heard a story a few years
ago of a village deprived of its satellite dish due to a
government ban, whose inhabitants managed to knock up a
makeshift one using a dustbin lid! True or not, I don't know,
but it still seems appropriate somehow that the song
'Under Pressure', which I will always remember as a part of
those months in China, was itself created from a session of
studio improvisation!
What
a difference twenty five years makes! Left - a newspaper picture
of the Nanjing Road, Shanghai, in 1982, and right, a night view taken of
almost the same section in 2007, found on an internet blog!
Hammer
to Fall - The German Connection
The
heavy rock song 'Hammer to Fall' was written by Brian May,
appearing on the 1984 album 'The Works'. He has made it very
clear that the song is purely about death. There have been some
questions asked and other
analogies made; I remember particularly one person asking if the
'hammer' came from the communist 'hammer and sickle' (Brian's
official site, letters May 03). This could be linked to the
lines:
For
we who grew up tall and proud
In
the shadow of the mushroom cloud
being
an overt reference to the Cold War. The image the song brings to
me has something to do with both the original meaning and this
other idea which crept in. The year the it was released, I was
travelling around many 'Iron Curtain' countries in Eastern
Europe. Five years later, the communist regimes in these
countries collapsed like dominoes. The possibility of the hammer
falling on us all through the nuclear threat is mentioned in
this song, but happily the hammer fell on the regimes of the
eastern bloc instead. One country had become of more interest to
me than any other - in 1983, I had spent one term as part of my
university course (in which I studied German as well as Chinese)
in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany. I took
the chance to go there because my university had an agreement
with the university which at that time bore the name of Karl
Marx in Leipzig. East Germany was a difficult place to get to
visit then, we would only hear about this small country's
overwhelming success in the Olympic games and about the 'Cold
War' frontier itself - the Berlin Wall. As a result of my visit,
I saw the Wall from the east side before I ever saw it from the
west, and I must be one of the very few westerners who can say
that. It was only on the west side where the Wall was daubed -
as we are on the 'More of that Jazz' page, it seems appropriate
to mention that the cover for the Jazz album (see below) was
conceived by Roger Taylor after seeing a Berlin Wall piece of
graffiti!* In the autumn of 1989, the extraordinary pictures of
the opening of this monstrous concrete barrier - people standing
on top of it, hacking away at it with pick axes, were
accompanied in my mind by the song - 'Hammer to Fall' - falling
on the Berlin Wall! So I've applied some 'artistic licence'
here; although the song is clearly about a human death, here
I've used it to write about another death - that of a state, a
death which was brought about that November night when 28 years
of separation were suddenly and gloriously brought to an end.
In
1983, Cold War rhetoric was still at a height. At this
particular time, the US were heavily involved in the 'Star Wars'
programme. Both sides had enough weapons to annihilate each
other, and both sides saw the other as the aggressor. It
was quite unusual for western students to study in East Germany
and we were therefore in a position of privilege- Russian was
the second language, so we very rarely encountered English
speakers. Also, we were able to meet people from Soviet-aligned
countries like Cuba and Vietnam - we also saw North Koreans, but
they weren't allowed to talk to us. Some people might think that
the term I spent in Leipzig added to my time in China turned me
into a raving Commy. This isn't the case, but it made me more
broadminded. Lined up behind the front line of 'the Warsaw Pact'
countries were ordinary people like us - not a nation of
muscle-building shotputters called Helga - this is a crude
stereotype, but Olympic athletes were the only representatives
of this country we ever saw. Apart from Olympians, very few
people were permitted to travel outside the country, and then
only to a small number of fellow communist states nearby.
The reason why the Berlin Wall was originally built was to stop
the country from haemorrhaging as a result of East German
citizens leaving for the West. East Germany had the opposite
problem to China - in the 'GDR' manpower was being boosted by
generous state benefits for having children. There was some
sense of irony when I told them about China's one child policy!
Mostly,
those who were allowed to travel to the west were pensioners -
retired people whose useful working life was over. However, I
met one girl who was a little younger than me who fell into this
category due to illness. She went to visit relatives in the
west, and told me an interesting story. It had to do with the
fact that, although just about everything was available in the
'GDR', there was a lack of variety and/or scarcity of some
items. Her western relatives suggested that she buy some
saucepans for her family back home. But on going into the
supermarket, there was such a range of saucepans, she was unable
to choose, and came out with her money unspent. She'd had a
crisis of choice brought about by the fact that such items came
into East German shops so rarely that they were normally snapped
up within minutes. This was echoed by some of my fellow
students, who were studying English but finding it almost
impossible to find a decent English-German dictionary. They
found it amazing that I could go into a bookshop in the UK and
pick up a large Collins at any time - they didn't run out!
Apart
from the lack of freedom to travel, the other main oppression in
East German life was the Stasi (Staatssicherheitsdienst), or
state security. People always had to watch what they said,
because they never knew if a fellow-student, colleague or even
relative was working for the Stasi by reporting back on
conversations which betrayed anti-government thinking. Many
found themselves in the position of doing this for a short time,
possibly to get themselves out of some sort of trouble. But
those who worked full-time for the Stasi led a privileged life;
the Stasi official whose job it was to look after the British
students (of course, we were freer to express our own ideas, but
they were basically 'talent spotting' us possible for future
spies), was among the minority of the population of Leipzig who
had a telephone. Later, at the time of the changes in 1990, a
former fellow student informed me that the telephone exchange in
Dresden was so old (dating back to the war) that the company
Siemens, who had been charged with upgrading the
telecommunications system there, put it straight into their
museum! Despite the lack of private 'phone lines, the Staasi
itself had access to state-of-the-art telecommunications for its
eavesdropping operations.
The
other thing that was something of a luxury in the old East
Germany was ownership of a car. The only vehicles on East German
streets were Soviet tanks and Trabants or 'Trabis' - the East
German manufactured car, and there was a waiting list to get one
of these. I was living and working in Munich from 1990 to 1991
when many 'Ossies', or East Germans, were driving their Trabis
on the streets there. This was a familiar sight for me but
against a totally different backdrop - this time alongside the
Mercedes and other big 'Wessie' makes! Even later, towards
the turn of the millenium, I visited a former fellow student in
Berlin, who by that time had acquired a Mitsubishi. She said
that if somebody had told her at one time that she would one day
drive such a car through the Brandenburg Gate, she would have
considered them mad. Up to the opening of the wall, the
Brandenburg Gate was totally unapproachable, and I took the
opportunity of this my most recent visit to walk through the
gate myself - something that I would also once have thought
impossible. The same former fellow student had benefited from my
hospitality about nine years before when, soon after the
changes, she was able to visit the UK, having previously studied
English and had no chance to do so. She had been issued with an
East German passport, and it was only about a fortnight before
the political unification which would enable her to become a
fully-fledged citizen of the European Community (or Union, as it
is now).
Going
back to my time in Munich, I enjoyed living there, and there was
plenty of work for mother-tongue speakers of English, especially
those who had a good mastery of German. The economy was booming
from the takeover of the East, whose industry was rapidly
collapsing. There was a good life to be had outside of work -
visiting outdoor swimming pools, the surrounding lakes or
various drinking holes, notably the upmarket cocktail bars of
Schwabing, in the north of the city. Someone told me that
Freddie had once frequented such places - I don't know if it's
true but I could just imagine it. In one of them, I got into
conversation with the roadie of Rod Stewart, whose concert I
attended (supported by Simple Minds) in the Olympic Stadium.
Although
East Germans knew an awful lot about the west (almost everywhere
in the communist state could receive West German TV, which,
despite it being illegal, they frequently watched), the reverse
was not the case. The only reason that West Germans would have
any knowledge of the East would be through visiting relatives
there. I therefore found it ironic that, during my time working
in Munich, I was often asked by Germans about the land of their
fellow-countrymen with which they were about to be unified.
Though an outsider, I found myself strangely poised between the
two Germanies, genuinely being able to see both points of view:
I also took the opportunity to go back to Leipzig and Dresden at
the time of the changes. I found the shops were becoming ever
more westernised; the still lingering Soviet soldiers were
getting a taste of capitalism as they peered at expensive
jewellery displays. Like the town of Chemnitz, the university
which I had attended had been divested of its 'Karl Marx'
epithet and been changed back to the 'University of Leipzig'.
Similarly, many streets regained their pre-war names - my friend
near Dresden explained that at one time, the old were the only
people capable of finding their way around!
It's
amazing that a piece of history that seems so recent is now
something that has to be explained to the young generation. I do
this in the classroom with the help of a current map, running my
finger along the areas where the borders lay. It's natural that
Germany is one nation again - one people. But I'll always
remember the contact I had with this country that no longer
exists - and I'm sure the same is true for my contemporaries
among the East Germans - even more so because, despite all its
shortcomings, it's where they grew up.
More
about the music associated with my student days can be found in
connection with the Tribute Concert - look at the top and the
bottom of this page for the link.
*Source
- 'Queen - The Definitive Biography' by Laura Jackson, p. 120
Somehow
I have to make this final breakthru... NOW!*
Graffiti
appeared only on the West Berlin side of the wall - it
was not allowed on the East side, where only blank
concrete was on display. Since the changes, the 'East
Side Gallery' has given artists the chance to vent their
creativity in a way that had never previously been
possible. This is my favourite (right) - Birgit Kinder's
'Test the Best' - showing a 'Trabi' blasting through!
*It
brings to mind a line from Queen's song 'Breakthru',
coincidentally released in 1989
The
charity '46664' was created to address an African problem which
has already had a massive impact – that of Aids. Nelson
Mandela has lent his support to a campaign to raise funds and
awareness about the issue, the name of it being his former
prisoner number, and a concert was put together in November 2003
in Cape Town to launch it.
It
was great to see a recording of this event. Two of the groups
performing - Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the Corrs - I had seen
when I had the good fortune to receive a free wristband through
a lottery to see the South Africa freedom concert in Trafalgar
Square in 2001. Nelson Mandela himself also spoke at that event.
This time, The Corrs spoke about singing in Zulu with Ladysmith,
and complaining that they didn't know the words, to which Joseph
of Ladysmith replied "It doesn't matter, feel it in your
heart". Great! It was also great to see Roger Taylor
playing drums with the Corrs in the folksy 'Toss the Feathers',
and Brian accompanied Andrea Corr for 'Is this the World We
Created?'
Also
in 2001, I had the opportunity to see Johnny Clegg at
Hammersmith. I had been in West Africa in 1988 when he was on
tour there but narrowly missed the opportunity to see the
concert. He is a white South African, who flew in the face of
apartheid by singing and dancing with Zulus, and was always
being censored and harassed as a result. He performed his
defiant song 'Asimbonanga' at this event.
Annie
Lennox sang ‘Seven Seconds Away’ with Youssou n’Dour, from
Senegal, who was introduced to the British public many years ago
by Peter Gabriel, (once upon a time the lead singer of Genesis).
I remember it was in the early days of breakfast
television and they discovered that Youssou could only speak
French, so Peter Gabriel had to translate. Gabriel himself (he
sang ‘Biko’ at this event, I believe for the first time in
South Africa) is an accomplished linguist and once translated
and recorded one of his solo albums entirely in German. (See
'Radio Ga Ga - Lost in Translation?' at the top of this page for
some comments about the translation of Queen songs).
Other
performers at the concert included Zucchero, Beyonce, Yusuf
Islam, Bono, The Edge, Dave Stewart, Ms. Dynamite and Bob Geldof.
There were some Queen medleys including 'Invincible Hope' and
'46664 The Call'. The finale featured Anastacia singing 'Amandla',
'We Will Rock You' and 'We are the Champions'. It was great to
see the African drummers beating out the intro to WWRY!
Las
Palabras de Amor - 46664 Latino, Benidorm, August 2004
A
footnote - oh dear, what concert? I started writing pieces for
this site in July and had earmarked the above title to use for a
review - I had booked to fly out and see this follow-up to the
South African concert. It's Saturday, 21 August at 7.30 pm
and I'm on my hotel balcony in Benidorm typing away on my laptop
instead of preparing to get out to the concert - because it was
postponed. Ironically, this did turn out to have a lot to do
with 'Las Palabras de Amor' - in this case, the words of Mr José
Amor, official in charge of events at Benidorm's town hall, who
at the end of July said the concert wasn't suitable for Benidorm
and that its success could not be guaranteed because some more
successful Latino artists had not been confirmed to appear. Too
bad - I'd booked my flight and hotel on non-amendable tickets -
I'd been looking forward to hearing Brian and Roger play for a
great cause. Not much information was given by the charity or
the promoters (they must have lost out as well as the performers
and fans) as to precisely what went so wrong with the
planning of this big event, announced in the middle of June,
that it had the plug pulled on it six weeks later and only three
weeks before it was due to take place (poor ticket sales
apparently being partly to blame). Apart from a couple of
Spanish media items posted on 'Queenzone' and Brian's responses
on his own site (decent of him to answer at all, as a performer
what could he do?), there was a total dearth of
information.
Anyway,
I've had a relaxing and peaceful short break in Benidorm, even
though my reason for coming didn't happen. I've divided my time
between strolling around the town and looking at the sights,
also along the front and the beach, swimming in the hotel pool
and finishing off pieces for this site. Home tomorrow! Let's
hope I'll be able to make the postponed event, whenever and
wherever that will be.
You
ask me where to begin
Am I so lost in my sin
You ask me where did I fall
I'll say I can't tell you when
But if my spirit is lost
How will I find what is near
Don't question I'm not alone
Somehow I'll find my way home
My sun shall rise in the east
So shall my heart be at peace
And if you're asking me when
I'll say it starts at the end
You know your will to be free
Is matched with love secretly
And talk will alter your prayer
Somehow you'll find you are there.
Your friend is close by your side
And speaks in far ancient tongue
A season’s wish will come true
All seasons begin with you
A world we all come from
A world we melt into one
Just hold my hand and we're there
Somehow we're going somewhere
Somehow we're going somewhere
You ask me where to begin
Am I so lost in my sin
You ask me where did I fall
I'll say I can't tell you when
But if my spirit is strong
I know it can't be long
No questions I'm not alone Somehow I'll find
my way home
'I'll Find My Way Home' by
Jon and Vangelis.
05
Mar 05 - Article From Rock Radio Website:
Teacher
hails Rock music in school
With
Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," German teacher Steffen
Reinhold showed the students at Ryle High School in America that
they aren't that much different from their German counterparts.
Reinhold, from Leipzig, Germany, visited the school last week as
part of the two-week East German Teacher Visitor Program. To get
into the program, Reinhold said, the teachers have to have been
born in East Germany and never been to the United States.
Aside from the differences that existed before the fall of the
Berlin Wall, Reinhold said, American teenagers and German
teenagers are pretty much the same.
A music teacher, Reinhold directs a choir in his school. Like
American teenagers, his students enjoy performing music that is
more modern, such as "Bohemian Rhapsody," he said.
"In GDR (German Democratic Republic) time, you had to learn
Russian," Reinhold said. "For 10 years I learned
Russian, but I don't speak any Russian." Rather, he said,
he focused on English so that he could read the lyrics in the
liner notes of Pink Floyd's "The Wall."
On a trip to Hungary, when he was younger, Reinhold said he was
allowed to take only the equivalent of $350 out of East Germany.
During the trip he bought "The Wall," for what was the
equivalent of $50, leaving him only $300 to spend on food and a
place to stay.
Like others who had made the trip to buy records they could not
get in East
Germany, Reinhold spent the nights in Hungary at a free
campground, which the Hungarians called "Idiot Camps."
"I did it just once in my life, and I did it for the
records," he said.
It was fortuitous to find this article on
the Rock Radio website this week, as it is a good starting point
for one of the ‘journeys’ I was going to write about on this
page. Having already written quite a bit about my experiences of
life in the German Democratic Republic, I was going to bring
together a few more thoughts about the divided Germany and its
unification.
The above article shows that the
young people in East Germany were never a lot different from
their western counterparts, and it is interesting that Queen is
the starting point here. The fact that Queen were allowed to
play in Hungary in 1986 cannot disguise the fact that the
governments of ‘Iron Curtain’ countries were generally very
wary of rock bands playing concerts within their borders –
Freddie was quoted as saying that they were not allowed to play
in Russia because of fears that they might corrupt the youth.
At the time of my stay in East
Germany, the artists who were best known through, I believe,
having played concerts there were Smokie and Bonnie Tyler.
Of course, as shown in the article above,
there was a widespread interest among young people in learning
English to give them access to the lyrics of songs. The fact is,
however, that this was quite difficult, Russian being compulsory
in schools and the language that everyone was expected to learn.
As the writer of the above article states, few people actually
learned it! The interest in it was virtually non-existent –
the language was forced on them, and they had no opportunity to
practise it. Despite the links, very few East German citizens
were able to visit the then USSR; as one East German girl told
me at the time, ‘they don’t want us to see the poverty that
really exists there’. Among my fellow students in Leipzig who
were studying English, I remember one joke we had about the
learning of Russian. It’s difficult to get the humour when
translating from German into English. But as this is the
Internet and therefore international, some Germans speakers may
read it and appreciate it. We were all staying together in the
house of one of the students just outside Dresden:
One of the students opened a Russian
text book previously used at school, and read a phrase in its
German translation:
‘Ich habe russisch in der Schule
gelernt aber ich habe keine Übung – I’ve learned
Russian at school but don’t get any practice – to
which another replied, as quick as a flash ‘es sollte heissen,
ich habe keine Ahnung!’
– it should say that I’ve no idea!
The only country they could visit
with ease was (as it was then) Czechoslovakia, possibly Hungary,
as mentioned in the above article, and remotely possible was
Bulgaria.
14
Jul 05: Another Anecdote about East Germany
When I had glandular fever back in 1983 I
was studying in East Germany, and was very ill. That is the only
time I’ve ever been in hospital apart from having my daughter,
back in the UK, nine years later. So the first time I was ever
in hospital I was away from home – and my knowledge of medical
vocabulary in German made a stunning advance! It must have been
late in June, because we were due to leave the country, that I
began a 12-day stay in the St Georg hospital in Leipzig. I was
ordered not to leave my bed for a week because my lymphatic
system was so swollen that my spleen might burst, and my liver
would also be in danger!
Doctors in East Germany were among
the professional classes who were entitled to a number of
benefits such as good housing. However, there was generally a
labour shortage, and we were often visited and treated by a
Vietnamese nurse, among the many Vietnamese migrant workers in
the country at the time.I
later found out that, when the German Democratic Republic - the
official name for East Germany - was founded in
1949, they modelled their health service on our British NHS!
I was on a ward with two other women, one
quite old, the other probably in her late thirties. Aided by a
diet of stodge, strawberries, and peppermint tea I was nursed
back to health. Having had to obtain an extension on my visa, I
was finally discharged and allowed to travel home. Before I
left, I picked up a parcel for a fellow British student which
had arrived too late to reach her there. However, the main
contents of the parcel had been removed as being unpermitted
material, leaving only a letter. When I forwarded it to her on
my return to the UK, I asked, out of curiosity, about the
removed item. A friend had attempted to send her a book - a copy
of ‘Lolita’ by the banned Soviet author Nabokov!
05
Nov 05 - A Tale from Pakistan
When I went to Pakistan in the autumn of
1984, it certainly proved to be an unusual adventure. I remember
that I was on a train from Karachi up to Rawalpindi in the
north. As the train was twenty-four hours late, I was already
confused about which day it was! I had arranged to meet the
brother of my friend Zamir at a ‘youth hostel’ which was no
longer a youth hostel, but a scout centre! I’d become
convinced Zamir’s brother was arriving the next day, and was
surprised when he turned up soon after I arrived! I then
realised that this was because of the extreme amount of overtime
I’d done on the train!
I had met Zamir when I was a
student in Shanghai where he was studying for a degree in
Mechanical Engineering at Tongji University, which was near the
university where I was studying, Fudan. That had been in 1982.
At the time of this visit to his two years later, he was still
studying in China.
The family lived in a small town
called Wah Cantt between Rawalpindi and Peshawar which is the
town on the Afghan border. His mother lived in a small house,
which had a mini farmyard at the back. Many women would gather
there to talk during the day. But I stayed at the house of
Zamir’s sister, who was married to a pilot for Kuwaiti
Airlines. Her husband was therefore usually absent, and in the
social structure of Pakistan at the time, she relied very much
on her eldest son to ‘guard’ the household. Under the
leadership of General Zia-ul-Haq, women were expected to walk
behind men, and there was segregation in public places like cafés
and buses. Purdah was strictly observed and most women remained
in the home.
My stay in Wah Cantt was to be
limited, however. This was because my presence in the village
had been reported – the family did not know it, but they were
supposed to have asked permission to have a foreigner staying
with them! Two local officials came to Zamir’s mother’s
house to question me.They
were not happy about me remaining there – this may have had
something to do with having two close members of my family
working for the UK Civil Service – they maybe suspected I was
a spy! But spying on what? It’s generally believed that Zia
ul-Haq was “actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program”
(backed by its allies, China and the USA),1 and, the
fact that there was a military base in Wah Cantt and it was
close to the capital Islamabad, I’ve heard some informed
wisdom that this is where is was happening! This would
definitely explain the sensitivity about having foreigners in
the town!
So I had to move out, having been
told that I might be welcome again if the correct procedures
were followed. I returned to Islamabad, and there are other
stories I could tell about my time in Pakistan, such as my visit
to Gilgit, in the mountains, which involved taking the cheapest
flight in the world! It was there that I visited the only
Chinese Cemetery I’d ever seen – I never saw one during my
time in China (there appeared to be no space for them) – the
Chinese who perished in the building of the Karakoram Highway
linking the two countries are to be found there.
I shall have to save these other stories
for another time, and hopefully find some pictures to go with
them!
Another ten years on, in 1997, the opening of Béjart’s
‘Ballet for Life’: “le Presbytère n'a rien perdu de son
charme, ni le jardin de son éclat” took
placein
Paris. The dancing is choreographed to recordings of Queen, both
studio and live.
The ‘Ballet for Life’ reached London in 2000 and the
attendance of a Mr. Ben Elton shows that the presentation of
Queen’s music within the domain of the theatre was already
being closely examined. Only two years later, London would see
another theatrical production, bearing the name of a well-known
song, stage its worldwide premiere. In all this excitement, it
has become a little lost in the mists of time (but remembered on
Brian’s ‘Back to the Light’ album), that, when the song
‘We Will Rock You’ was first released, the words of the
title were already familiar from an old lullaby carol. That idea
came full circle when Linda Ronstadt later recorded a lullaby
version of Brian’s song for her album ‘Dedicated to the One
I Love’ (1996). Among the many other cover versions of the
song is a children’s version (4), which features in another
ballet that uses Queen’s music, the ‘Tanzhommage an Queen’
- ‘Dance Homage to Queen’ – which opened at the Volksoper
in Vienna in 2007. The children’s version accompanies
dancing by members of the youth section of the Volksoper ballet.
(This
part of the ballet is choreographed by Nadia Deferm, and the
rest by Ben van Cauwenbergh).
Picture:
kulturchannel.at
In October I attended a performance of ‘The Tanzhommage an
Queen’, at the end of which the audience spontaneously broke
into clapping that familiar rhythm from the start of ‘We Will
Rock You’. Although rock history regards the song as part of
Queen’s answer to punk. Ironically, a conversation Freddie
reportedly had with Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols provided a
pointer to the future when he affirmed he was doing his best to
“bring ballet to the masses”!
People on
Streets.. 
her
analogies made; I remember particularly one person asking if the
'hammer' came from the communist 'hammer and sickle' (Brian's
official site, letters May 03). This could be linked to the
lines:
