PROSECCO
Famous Bus Stops of the World, No. 1
There is still time to enter your favourite bus stop in the LPA All Britain
Bus Stop of the Year Competition. There have been ugly rumours circulated
that this competition is in someway fixed. We would advise entrants that
we 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 on
the mainland have complained lack of adequate representation through this
method, we feel that only such a technique could capture the insularity
so typical of these islands.
We include an article here about a syndicalist activist from Hull who went
to Yugoslavia and started a fight at a bus stop. He started calling people
fascist when they maintained that bus seats were not private property but
for collective use. Please report any similar disturbances you may come
across.
PROSECCO is the name of a local sparkling wine in Trieste. It
is also the name of a stop on the number 44 bus route to the limestone plateau
above 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 independent
Slovenian republic. Slovenia was lucky in that it only suffered a ten-day
war which was ended by the Brioni Accord of 1991. The Slovene issue was
the one political problem of the former Yugoslavia which could be settled
by a one-off solution. When I was there the complaint of the Slovenes was
that tourism was suffering because foreigners had difficulty distinguishing
those 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 is
in east Croatia, not Slovenia.
This confusion does, however, have its beneficial effect for the traveller
determined to escape the traffic of northern Italy and get some peace and
quiet after Venice. One can in Trieste move freely between Slovenia and
Croatia: EC tourists and workers cross daily both ways, and workers also
cross from Slovenia to Italy to work in Trieste. We found ourselves in such
a party on one early morning bus. The custom, when one is forced out at
the border to go through customs, is to steal the seats of other passengers
before they can reboard. I employed as much abuse as I could think of against
the two women who stole ours: "thieves", "behaving like animals",
"lacking civilisation, education, culture, etc", but even a volley
of 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. Perhaps
we should recall that the Germans in 1943, organised the only concentration
camp in Italy at Trieste. When the Yugoslavs liberated the city in 1945
they found 20,000 identity cards. Mussolini described the zealots of this
region, as model fascists and the camp commander was a local man.
from "Rusting Roadsigns" by Mack the Knife, published in Syndicalist
Bulletin, May 1993, available from Hull Syndicalists, PO Box 102, Hull
(Tel: 0482-492388)
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