PROSECCO
Famous Bus Stops of the World, No. 1
There is still time to enter your favourite bus stop in the LPA All
BritainBus Stop of the Year Competition. There have been ugly
rumours circulatedthat this competition is in someway fixed. We
would advise entrants thatwe shall draw up a shortlist of one bus
stop per island in the British Isles(with a separate category for
bus stops on bridges). Although people onthe mainland have
complained lack of adequate representation through thismethod, we
feel that only such a technique could capture the insularityso
typical of these islands.
We include an article here about a syndicalist activist from Hull
who wentto Yugoslavia and started a fight at a bus stop. He started
calling peoplefascist when they maintained that bus seats were not
private property butfor collective use. Please report any similar
disturbances you may comeacross.
PROSECCO is the name of a local sparkling wine in
Trieste. Itis also the name of a stop on the number 44 bus route to
the limestone plateauabove the city: there one finds a rusting
roadsign marked "JUGOSLAVIA"and pointing eastwards; or at least it
was there last September.
Strange how such signposts survive the reality they are supposed to
indicate.The reality is that what was once northern Yugoslavia is
now the independentSlovenian republic. Slovenia was lucky in that
it only suffered a ten-daywar which was ended by the Brioni Accord
of 1991. The Slovene issue wasthe one political problem of the
former Yugoslavia which could be settledby a one-off solution. When
I was there the complaint of the Slovenes wasthat tourism was
suffering because foreigners had difficulty distinguishingthose
parts of former Yugoslavia which were still at war from those at
peace.This was not helped in 1991 when fighting broke out in
Slavonia which isin east Croatia, not Slovenia.
This confusion does, however, have its beneficial effect for the
travellerdetermined to escape the traffic of northern Italy and get
some peace andquiet after Venice. One can in Trieste move freely
between Slovenia andCroatia: EC tourists and workers cross daily
both ways, and workers alsocross from Slovenia to Italy to work in
Trieste. We found ourselves in sucha party on one early morning
bus. The custom, when one is forced out atthe border to go through
customs, is to steal the seats of other passengersbefore they can
reboard. I employed as much abuse as I could think of againstthe
two women who stole ours: "thieves", "behaving like
animals","lacking civilisation, education, culture, etc", but even
a volleyof foul language caused only a ripple of interest among our
fellow passengers.The phrase that really raised heat was " behaving
like fascists".Had we not been packed like sardines I'm sure
someone would have hit me:I nearly got a fist in my face as it
was.
What was surprising was that it took that word to get the Slovene's
attention:an English crowd would have objected to my earlier foul
language. Perhapswe should recall that the Germans in 1943,
organised the only concentrationcamp in Italy at Trieste. When the
Yugoslavs liberated the city in 1945they found 20,000 identity
cards. Mussolini described the zealots of thisregion, as model
fascists and the camp commander was a local man.
from "Rusting Roadsigns" by Mack the Knife, published in
SyndicalistBulletin, May 1993, available from Hull
Syndicalists, PO Box 102, Hull(Tel: 0482-492388)
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