LONDON CALLING!

G21 World Tour

by Rod Amis

G21 Editor & Publisher

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LONDON,18 June, 2001 - I receive encouraging letters from Dragan and Dragana every day, telling me to hurry. They help as I am in that all-too-familiar game of waiting for more money to arrive. Each day they ask via e-mail when it is I shall arrive. Each day I have to respond that I can't wait to come, it's all contingent of the arrival of my bailout money from California. Each day I wait for a rap on the door that will be my salvation. When night falls, I tell myself, "Worry will not help. It will come tomorrow."

This is what comes of flying by the seat of your pants. London, like any other town, is a depressing place to be broke. Most of all, when you are saying that you are merely passing through, what nags is the embarassment that comes as you suspect people no longer believe your assurances that your cash is on the way. Though you do nothing to indicate it, they act as if you are pulling a scam and have no intention of moving on.

You can feel the pressure of them wondering what's wrong with you and why don't you just leave.

It becomes a balancing act. How much do you spend on food? Will you get the hairy eye if, just to get out of the flat and not be under foot, you go out and write in a pub instead and pass your time with a pint? (How can he waste his money on pints when he can't afford to get out of here?) So instead of enjoying a pleasant afternoon, one without rain for a change, enjoying the ambience of the pub, what it's like to be in Hackney, bloody Hackney, your thoughts about soon leaving this place, you torture yourself with what is being thought of, about you, and where is the FedEx man, and when shall I be gone?

Well, you don't, but I do.

AND I try not to smoke as many cigarettes. They are 4.33 pounds for a full pack here (approx. $6.46 USD,) or two bucks a pack more than I'm used to. Even Bermuda was less expensive. You always smoke less when you are under stress...

THE MAGAZINE

Pitches/Queries from new potential writers keep rolling in. You try to explain that

• G21 is not what it appears to be (WE HAVE NO MONEY)
• that The World's Magazine is the manifestation of a dream (WE HAVE NO MONEY;)
• nobody gets paid around here;
• the publisher has not stayed in one place for weeks;
• we have no money;
• you want to build up your store of clips and appear to be working for a world class Web magazine, though, this is the place to be. BUT we have no money.

It's summer, so the weekly schedule was supposed to have kicked in by now, and so it shall, just in time for the solstice. I am going to Beograd (I think) and publishing will have to wait.

PALADIN

It's about this time that it strikes me that I've gone into pubs all over Hackney at various times of day and found men sitting around over pints reading newspapers, or watching whatever is being broadcast on the television, or just lowing over their glasses --- DURING THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY EVEN -- and I realize they have no other place to go, either. But they are not passing through like me. This is their lives.

I was explaining to Garreth, who is also staying at Felicity Ussher's flat while he and her cousin, Laila, try to find jobs in London and settle here in England after moving from South Africa, how the American facade is just that.

Yes, a lot of the world's wealth is concentrated in my country, I try to explain, but at the same time a lot of average working people are barely getting by. Too many people are one down-sizing away from desperation and homelessness. More than our hype and arrogance indicate. While America has a huge military-industrial complex, down-sizing has eliminated job security and transformed the lives of millions upon millions of Americans.

I try to explain how unions, organized labor, have been under assault for decades. How this is the process by which the disciples of "globalization" have reduced workers -- not just in America, but around the world -- to competing serfs. How the very concept of social services and employment benefits is being eliminated by America-based corporations. How "workfare" labor -- legalized slavery -- is being used to de-unionize the public sector and drive down wages in general.

He looks at me in amazement BECAUSE NOBODY EVER HEARS ABOUT THE DARK SIDE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM. It's a topic I could go on about for days, seeing the Arbeit Machts Frei agenda take hold in America, with the poorest of the poor bearing the burden of making the rich richer, but I forebear.

It's obvious by now to people that I meet here in England that I am running scared. I am running from America because I see something horrifying happening in my country. It is difficult, in this consumerist world, for most people to understand why I would flee The Gold Mountain. And if you use the F word (not the obscene one, the political one) people immediately close their ears.

It's not popular being a Leftist under The Dome...

INTO EUROPA

The papers here in London say that, with the pound doing so well against the Euro these days, even though suffering against the dollar, the referendum on joining the single currency (and, thus, the European Union) might be in jeopardy. Fickle popular sentiment seems to hold onto the hope that the UK can benefit from their being a unified Europe without actually taking part in the entity. (And that's why the New World continues to look askance at the war-torn Old World, of course.)

England, Ireland, Denmark all question the notion that there can be a united Europe. As do we all. The Raj will not easily forget its "sun rises and sets" world. Papers here also tout the idea that English will become the linqua franca (think about that irony!) of the Internet.

I'm not saying that this analysis is wrong, of course, only that it makes for interesting observation. Observing is what we writers do best.

I believe it will be interesting to see what all this posturing looks like from the perspective of Eastern Europeans, outside of The Dome. After all, historically speaking and as most Serbs know, as LIONEL ROLFE let me know that some English -- like Lady Muriel Turner (a friend of Mr. Blair's in the "Hampstead dining set" Re: Sunday's Daily Mail) know -- we have totally mischaracterized the Serbian role in WW II, among other things. AND NOW we ask the Serb's to assist KFOR (the United Nations peacekeeping force in the former Yugoslavia) with Macedonia. The irony is piled on irony.

But I'm not a political journalist any longer...

LONDON, 19 June, 2001 - Things can always get crappier. Yesterday I thought that by today I'd be receiving the cash infusion to get me off this sticky flypaper and into the wind again. Last night, I learned: WRONG!

Guess what, Bucko, the promised cash ain't coming and the question proffered is: What's the bare minimum that can be done to move you on to Serbia?

How things change. While I was in Bermuda, and work needed to be done (ditto my first week here,) it was don't worry about a thing, just get the work done, everything will be okay, we've got you covered.

The only funny part of this whole story is that I believed it. My bad. So, now I'm cast adrift wondering how things will turn out. In this kind of situation the Rodboy Way is to do something drastic. I'm wondering if its possible to hitch-hike across the EU if I make it to the Continent. Those kind of thoughts are definitely crossing my mind. I'm already in the fire, after all, there's nowhere to go from here but up.

As senior citizens, homeless people and drunks can tell you, one of the most important activities for people with time on their hands is to find a place to loiter where you don't have to spend money. Parks are at the top of the list. Parks are right above libraries, the rainy day refuge. It's a t-shirt day in London, my first.

For a man with a laptop, safety becomes a big issue. You need a busy place where the crook wouldn't risk being nabbed. Otherwise, your options are the area in front of a public building -- town halls are always good. Or you go for a coffee shop or a pub. There could be thieves at those places, too; but in a coffee shops they're probably too depressed to take action and in a pub they'd be too drunk to get away.

I went to the public square myself, after a surveying a few parks and finding them too isolated; onlyl people who looked more broke than me and thereby potential thieves.) Hackney's central square, below St. John's clock tower at the bus interchange, was good because it's also a great place to People Watch -- another entertainment of people with little money and lots of time.

I didn't break out the laptop this time. I decided to do t his the old-fashioned way -- pen and pad -- to transcribe a bit later. The number of cigarette butts in my general area told me I'd picked a tried-and-true spot.

The first thing you notice in a place like this is the number of young women pushing prams (baby carriages.) Many are even accompanied by the perpetrators. There's no doubt about it, the poor aren't suffering a zero population growth problem in this city. That makes the "birds" without babies all-the-more noticeable. And here agaain, at 1:30 in the afternoon, there is no shortage of men with no particular place to go. Those few in ties, with briefcases, on a bee-line to their destinations with purposeful strides are conspicuous.

It's a multi-ethnic, polygot crowd trafficking this busy square. It seems one will see every nation of the former Empire pass this way if one but sits long enough. Henry Miller probably felt the same, loitering in apark in Paris.

My friend Raoul Tesla tells me in an e-mail today that its fast and easy for an American to get a work visa in the European Union. I'm hoping the same is true about the old Eastern Bloc.

Leave it to the Irish, God love them! It seems an Irishman can spot me a mile away. A woman joined me on the bench. No sooner had I paused from my notes to enjoy a smoke than she struck up a conversation. I learn quickly that she is Irish, has a female friend she is helping who is from Sierre Leone, that latter woman's life story, that my raconteur has been raised not to buy anything from the likes of DeBeers, that she is now married to a West Indian, that she felt no compunction about ripping off multinational corporations. "I raised my children by ripping off the toilet rolls from McDonald's!" she exclaims before going off to catch her bus. "Good luck in Bosnia, Luv!" "It's Serbia" "Right now. Good luck!"

Of course, if you've still got a few sou, and the time stretches ahead of you (I have to wait for it to be this morning in America before the wheels of my personal Fate begin turning again. Let us pray.) a pub has an inevitable draw. Well, for me it does.

I pop in a pub to transcribe the earlier notes and find that Ascot is being broadcast. The men in this pub, The Dolphin on Mare Street are punters. They pop out to William Hill (the English off-track-betting establishment) to place their bets between races. In their blue plastic shopping bags are racing forms. The big screen in The Dolphin dominates the room with images of swells talking seriously about the horses and their prospects. I decide I can't stay here as the whiskies are a pound forty and I can get well doubles ("large," they say here) down the road a bit at London Fields for two pound. Oddly, The Dolphin is the more working class pub, but the prices are worse. It doesn't make sense to me. The Dolphin is rough-hewn as its clientele, no carpet on the floors, almost like a church of alcohol and a Puritan one at that. Meanwhile, London Fields is quite posh by comparison, with carpetted floors, ceiling fans, curtains on the windows (it actually has windows!), VH-1 Classics playing on one of the overhead televisions and supplying a soft-pop haze over the proceedings, intermixed with advertisements for Oxfam and other American Expressl, etc., while Ascot races run on the other. London Fields also prominently features its menu. Go figure.

Neither place, this far from Hackney Center, get the kinds of business of the pubs closer to the transportation hub there, though. By the end of Rush Hour those places are impossible to get a seat in, let alone hear yourself think.

Enough on the pub tour for now.

The other thing I can tell you about Hackney is that it is very much straight out of the soap "EastEnders" you've probably seen on Public Televison in the States, if you are an Anglophile. You overhear a lot of the same conversations. It's not untypical to hear the bartendress's argument with her son with a rep' for nicking things and how now he's with her in London he has to work and why is he bringing shite that should be discussed later at home into her job. (Like I say, thieves can be found anywhere.)