Bah! Hamburg

This is a piece that came out in this month’s Ryanair Magazine. Steve took the shots. We spent a couple of quick days investigating the underground scene in Hamburg, Germany’s wealthiest capital. If I’m honest I don’t like this article so much, but it’s what happens when you set yourself ridiculous deadlines and then ridiculously try and meet ‘em.

The real estate around Speckstrasse in downtown Hamburg is some of the most expensive concrete you can walk on in Europe. You share the footpaths with suits and business types running late for power lunches. Glass towers and polished metal rods reach up to the skies and give you the impression that you’ve just walked into a hall of mirrors. This is no place for any scruffy art student with anti-capitalist leanings. But something happened last summer and changed all that.

A group of artists and activists broke into 12 empty buildings and began to decorate and live in them. The squat is now called the Gängeviertel and occupies a patch of land worth millions. It’s what happens if you live in a city where the developers sit on run-down land waiting for prices to rise, and the citizens lose patience with them.

The squatters have been courteous and cooperative with city officials who, so far, instead of kicking them out have engaged them in meetings about the future development of the area. In effect, they made them the landlords. Marc Einsiedel, a 26-year-old who runs a screen-printing business was part of the first group of squatters.

“I have wi-fi but I don’t have a toilet yet,” he says. The buildings, as with all squats, were in a pretty bad state of disrepair when they first moved in. “I had to wire the whole system and all winter we just had portable heaters.”

Hamburg sits on the Elbe river, near the North Sea, and in winter the harbour freezes over and icebreakers have to cut paths for the cargo boats to land. If you want to squat a building in Hamburg, it’s important that you’re built of strong stuff. But if you ask Marc what the worst thing about squatting is, he’ll tell you it’s the meetings. They all gather regularly to discuss how to proceed with renovating the buildings and deal with city officials. “Meetings can go on until two in the morning,” he says. Democracy, done properly, takes a tediously long amount of time.

If the project works, the whole area will become an inner-city haven for artists, while the hostel – already up and running – will fit nicely into that rare group, along with prisons and park benches, of the strangest places you can spend a night. The Gängeviertel may sound like a project with its head in the clouds but it’s happening in a city full of precedent. The Rote Flora, across town in Schanzenviertel, has been an autonomous squat for more than 20 years. It was recently bought by a private investor, who claims he won’t change as much as a brick.

Hamburgers are headstrong and determined. They sent the Vikings, the Poles and the Danes packing. “Die Stadt gehört uns” (“the city belongs to us”) is a piece of graffiti you see very often, and in Hamburg there’s nothing throwaway or naive about it.

Rote Flora, an old theatre with space zoned for housing developments, was transformed into a park and operates as a political centre and venue for the Left. You can catch live music there most nights of the week, and the crowd are mostly punks. Hardcore punks. The McDonald’s that sprang up a block away had police protection for its first three months of operation and still got its windows smashed every other night. Hamburgers are famous for their confrontational personalities. It’s not a rough city, but you do hear people giving each other a piece of their mind on every other corner.

Bryan Leland, 35, hears it every night. He’s a PhD student who sleeps on the steps of the Rote Flora. He’s spent 15 long years working on a metaphysics paper, and now all he has to show for it is a beard and a family who gave him the choice: academia or us? He went with the metaphysics and has been about a month on the streets as a result.

“It is possible to live in Hamburg with no money,” he says. “It’s a very rich city but there is a strong community here taking care of each other.”

Bryan eats every night at places called “Volksküchen” (“people’s kitchens”). They’re basically impromptu restaurants in community centres where people pay as much as they can afford for their meal. In any other city, you’d call it a soup kitchen – but because it’s Hamburg these people’s kitchens are nice enough to date in. The Volksküche on Hafenstrasse is run by a different group every night. Students and youngsters, they arrive two hours before serving time, turn on some loud techno and start preparing mostly vegan dishes for whoever turns up. You’re asked to pay a suggested price of €2.50. Of course, if you don’t have any money this isn’t the kind of place to turn you away! A sign over the menu reads: “Eat the rich but drink with the poor.”

Maybe it’s easier to be anti-capitalist in a rich city where squatters are met with dialogue rather than truncheons, and a social welfare safety net exists to catch you. But Hamburgers have seen a lot of bad developments in their city, and that’s given them a healthy suspicion of money.

“An interesting fact about Hamburg,” says Karlo Kanibalo. “There were more buildings destroyed here after the war than during the war. The suburbs look like prisons now.” Karlo is an artist and gallery owner. Art Store, his shop on Wohlwillstrasse, sells only cheap art. Artists who want to exhibit are given a price scale that they have to stick to, and you can buy some for just €10. Previously, he had two shopping trolleys in the store. One for cheap art and the other for ultra-cheap art.

“Freedom is part of the old Hamburger spirit,” he says. “It’s even reflected in the street names.” It’s true. Grosse Freiheit and Kleine Freiheit (“Big Freedom” and “Little Freedom”) are two well-known streets in the city. Hamburgers have long been known for their entrepreneurial spirit. Fischkopp record shop on Grabenstrasse is staffed by volunteers, and all the profits go back into community development. Schanzenbuch bookshop is also run by a collective who meet to make decisions on the educational merit of a book before they stock it. And the Umsonstladen in Billstedt is an “exchange warehouse”, where people can offload unwanted furniture, clothes and bric-a-brac for free, and walk out with unwanted furniture, clothes and bric-a-brac for free!

Historically, Hamburg has always had a strain of the outsider about it. Like any city built around a harbour, it has greedily imbibed new influences and ideas as they arrive from the sea. Perhaps the thick atmosphere of freedom and possibility in the tree-lined streets has something to do with the city’s geography?

Spread over 155ha is HafenCity, the largest inner-city building development in all of Europe – its 21st century architecture expected to provide a workplace for 40,000 people. So far it’s squat free, but knowing the Hamburgers it’s only a matter of time before that’s changed.

The Old Man and the Sea

I spent a week in Berber Country in South Western Morocco in February. I was doing a surf story for Ryanair Magazine.  If every story I did was a surf story for Ryanair Magazine, I think I’d be the happiest little freelancer in the world.

Taghazout lies about a 25-minute drive north of Agadir. It’s built right on the shoreline. At high tide, you walk out the door and your feet get wet. And sometimes when storms batter the west coast of Morocco, you can’t even open that door. One storm back in the 1960s stayed for a week and left with the entire fishing fleet on its back. But in general the waves that creep towards the beach fall into the enticing rather than frightening bracket.

It’s home to a traditional Berber community but, because of its proximity to the sea and good surfing breaks, has always had a healthy mix of foreigners coming and going. It started with the British Navy who used to stop by and swap their rusty Winchesters and venereal diseases for provisions and trinkets. Then US Marines stormed through during World War II liberating the Moroccans from the Nazis. In the late 1960s, the children of the war vets blew into town bringing their own form of liberation called peace and love, and after them the first combi-vans full of surfers appeared.

Lahcen Aitidir (pictured, previous page) got his first surfboard from an Australian in 1971, but he’d been surfing before that. “We surfed on tree bark or pieces of palm trees,” he says. “But it wasn’t so nice. It cut your skin.” They were the original boogie boards.

Lahcen is 54. He’s a sinewy, short man and when you see him throwing himself off the rocks on a multi-coloured longboard you think he doesn’t stand a chance against the incoming waves. But then he ducks and weaves past the breakers and you remember he’s been in this water for half a century and is as comfortable on a wave as a mountain goat is on a mountain.

Lahcen lives with his wife in a beachfront house at Hash Point – which got its name for being the lazy man’s surf spot in Taghazout. It’s a right-hander that breaks just in front of the town. You can pretty much down your tea, pay your bill, make a slow run for the water and be dropping into a wave in a few minutes. It’s the place where the first hippies arrived in the 1960s, and Lahcen remembers the time well.

“They had no passports and they didn’t use money. They traded necklaces and jeans for fish or even hash. They stayed all day without clothes. People were used to it. It was a great time and they were very nice people,” he says.

The hippies stayed in Taghazout for nearly 10 years. They lived on the beach or with Berber families. Everyone in the town can produce old photos of them with some Joni Mitchell look-a-like. Hendrix visited during that time too. Rumours abound that his song Castles Made Of Sand was written about the vulnerable buildings along the beachfront, but since the track was written in 1967 and Hendrix did not actually visit Morocco until 1969, it remains unlikely. Lahcen doesn’t know if he met Hendrix or not. “I saw many people who looked like Jimi Hendrix then, and they all played music too. They were all Jimi Hendrix.”

In 1973 the Moroccan military arrived in Taghazout with 20 trucks. They brought the hippies to the airport and deported them. People in the town cried and protested. “Their families in America were probably looking for them, but we were crying because they were our friends, our family too.” The surfers who arrived in the 1970s didn’t replace the hippies, but they were met with the same affection. Lahcen remembers the first VW van. “It had a kangaroo on the side of it,” he says.

Even today, the surf spots in Taghazout aren’t rammed compared with those in Europe and the US. Twenty surfers out in the line-up constitutes a busy day here, while most breaks in California or even Cornwall could only dream of such intimacy. But back when Lahcen was first surfing, two other bodies in the water felt like a crowd. As the 1980s progressed, Taghazout became the only place in North African surfing.

James Bailey, 26, runs the Surf Berbere hostel and surf school. He’s Lahcen’s neighbour. A short holiday and a £200 (€228) deposit later, he was swapping city life in London for a place where sun and unpredictable bowel movements are both guaranteed. Like Goa and Costa Rica, Taghazout is home to that brave breed of traveller with the ingenuity to make their favourite destination their place of business.

Surfing is the only show in town these days, and any other tourism that exists is riding on the back of the industry. The surf schools offer lessons on what are probably some of the best breaks to learn on. The water’s warm, the waves are consistent, and thanks to the scarcity of booze (it’s still available, don’t worry), you’re not paddling out every morning trying to piece together the night before.

It’s a special, close-knit place. If you wander into the surf shops around the town and mention Lahcen’s name, they’ll tell you that the first board they ever surfed on was his. Surfboards were, and still are, luxury items. Improvisation, repair and scrounging are as much bywords of the Taghazout surfing community as low and high tide. It wasn’t a million years ago that people here were using telephone cable as leashes, and let’s not forget those palm-tree surfboards.

The generation that followed Lahcen grew up with an ownership over surfing. No longer just for blond Australians avoiding the winter back home, if one of their own could surf the same waves then why shouldn’t they? Moroccan youngsters would hit the water before school, then come back out again after the last bell rang. Like Brazilian kids dreaming of getting signed up on football contracts, the kids in Taghazout dreamt of surf sponsorships, and if that didn’t work they could open a surf shop or school. It was still a nicer life than their fathers’ or grandfathers’ who fished or farmed in the mountains.

Imane Zagraou, 30, is one of the first female Moroccan surfers. She runs a surf school and has a sponsorship deal with Rip Curl. Which in the Moroccan surf world is pretty much like having it all. But in order to get that far she’s had to put up with an annoying amount of negativity that comes from being a pioneer. “I got strange looks and people dropped in on me [my waves] on purpose,” she says. On top of that her business and registration papers took twice as long to process as they would normally do for a man. Taghazout may stand out for its liberal internationalism but it’s surrounded on one side by the sea and the other by a conservative Muslim population.

It’s this conservatism that starts funny rumours. One goes that during Ramadan the more devout surfers don’t go into the water for fear of swallowing and breaking their fast. Though that may be true for one or two, the people of Taghazout have grown up alongside hippies and travellers, and their laid-back attitude and curiosity is a product not only of their Berber roots but also a cosmopolitan mix of visitors.

So long as the swell is working Lahcen Aitidir still surfs during Ramadan. “You’re not a fish. You just close your mouth,” he says.

Catch the Pigeon

This is an article I did recently for Ryanair Magazine. It’s about pigeon racing in Dublin. Con ‘O Donoghue took the photographs and got a tonne of pigeon shit all over his lenses.

Finding a pigeon in Dublin is not hard. All you’ve got to do is locate a fast-food outlet, a stretch of water or a statue of a patriot and there you’ll see them in their thousands. Finding pigeon fanciers, the men who breed, train and race the birds to Olympic levels of athleticism, is a lot harder.

There are about 4,000 fanciers in the city today, yet 10 years ago there were double that amount. The preferred sport of taxi drivers, gangsters and the working classes is entering its twilight years but, as we discovered on a recent weekend, there’s life in the old bird yet.

Pascal Mulcahy, 74, is secretary of the Dublin Homing Club. A short, chirpy man – not unlike the birds he keeps – he’s been running the pigeon show in Ireland for longer than most

people care to remember. “In some quarters of Dublin I’m the biggest b**tard there is,” he says, dunking a digestive biscuit into a cup of very milky tea. Pascal feeds his favourite birds from his mouth, and never misses an opportunity to talk about his grandchildren – his “mini pigeon fanciers”. It’s hard to see how anyone could see anything mean in his character. “Well, I’ve had to step on a few toes to keep people in their place,” he says. “Fellas want to win. There’s a lot of emotion involved in bird racing.”

Pascal is the oldest pigeon fancier in Ireland. He’s been racing for 64 years. He bought his first pigeon aged 10 on Capel Street, on the north side of Dublin, in a small bird shop that’s now a Filipino food store. He started breeding them as a teenager. “I’d bring a half dozen down to Capel Street of a Saturday to sell, and they’d be back at the house that evening. I trained them to climb out of the trap. We all did that to make a bit of extra cash,” he says.

Small pennies back then, today champion pigeons are sometimes sold for as much as €250,000. Of course that means they don’t race them anymore. Instead, they just set them up in a plush coop with the highest quality straw floors and the best bird feed, and allow them to breed their retirement years away.

“Money doesn’t come into it at our level,” he says. “You do it just so you can see your name up on the board when you go to the clubhouse. It’s a chance to slag the other lads.”

Pigeon racers fit more than one stereotype. Many drive taxis, a few are wheeler-dealer types, and you’ll come across the odd out-andout gangster. The flash BMWs in the driveway of the clubhouse – a tired-looking redbrick building on the shoulder of the River Camac – are probably owned by the latter. The building itself is only used by pigeons and their fanciers, so doesn’t need to be anything better.

Community and loyalty – alongside the friendly rivalry that maintains the sport’s competitive edge – are an important part of pigeon racing. Pigeon fanciers help each other by sharing transport, maintenance costs and even offering free emergency surgery when fellow fanciers’ birds are injured. On some occasions the men have even organised bird auctions to raise money for the widows of fanciers who have passed on.

The club is full of characters. There’s an elderly Italian gent who claims to be the long lost nephew of the real Don Corleone, a guy they refer to as Kirk Douglas’s body double, and then Heno, the master tactician of the north-side pigeon-racing league – who studies the art of breeding and employs the latest technology to get the best form from his birds.

And form, in a nutshell, is horniness. The hornier you can get a bird the faster it flies home. Cocks are separated from hens for long periods. They are allowed to see each through the wire meshing in their lofts but not allowed to touch. In some cases, they are even shown their partners having sex with other birds to drive them mad with jealousy. Science, feeding and all manner of psychological trickery are employed, but at the end of the day it’s the pigeon most desperate to get some who wins the race.

The pigeons’ lofts are state-of-the-art, with heating, electronic sensors and surround-sound stereo systems to keep them relaxed before the races, and maybe to set the mood for when they get back. It’s important that their home is a sanctuary where they can relax in preparation for their marathon journeys. Irish and English birds fly home from as far away as France, Belgium and Germany. Some races can be as long as 1,800km. And with birds flying no faster than 80km/h, they can be gone for a couple of days.

But that’s not the race we’re attending. Ours is a mere sprint – a couple of hundred kilometres from Tipperary to Dublin. “The birds will be back before you are,” says Pascal. “Well, apart from the stupid ones.”

At 6am, 7,000 birds in two trucks make the trip south from Dublin. The fanciers drink tea and wait for a phone call from a man called the “liberator”, who’s holed up in an office in Dublin studying the day’s weather to find the best opening. The phone eventually rings, the cups of tea are put to one side, the conveyors man their posts, and in the blink of a camera shutter the blue sky turns to feathers and dust. After a couple of minutes circling trying to find their bearings, they head in the direction of Dublin.

“How do they know which way to go?” I ask. “It’s in the eyesight,” someone says. “No it’s not, it’s their hearing,” comes another voice. “Will you get away with that! They follow the road signs just like you and me,” says someone else.

Pigeons’ homing devices are in their heads, and work like solar compasses. But studies have shown that birds familiar with certain routes will follow landmarks like motorways and streets, even turning at junctions on their way home. And that’s where we lose them. The first group of birds dive off into west Dublin, then the last of the flock make their way out across the city to Swords and Howth.

At 10.36am, Pascal clocks his first bird home. It’s good enough to win second place and a share of the pools. The next day he gets a phone call from Carlow asking if he is missing a blue-tipped pigeon that had landed exhausted on the doorstep of a local pigeon fancier. “He was probably caught in an east wind. The bird might have flown halfway across the country and back – they’d just keep flying until they drop,” says Pascal.

Pigeons aren’t beautiful birds. In fact, they’re kind of the ugly ducklings of the skies. But they make up for that with their determination and a sex drive that hunger, exhaustion and high winds only temper. As we leave Pascal’s house that afternoon, the cooing in the bird coop rises noticeably. The winners must be getting their just rewards.

Eurotash in Ryanair

Ryanair, you might not think it as a passenger on their planes, are probably one of the coolest acts to work with. They accept some really leftfield pitches, and so long as you don’t mention anything dropping out of the sky or the brace position, they let it through. When they heard about our book, they went straight ahead and offered us a few pages worth of space to try and sell it. They did however run this photo. Now, small as it is here, you can’t tell what came before. So here’s a little Top 20 style rundown of how bad a shape we were in before we got the pic taken.

5 days before: London, Free Bar at the Movember Launch.

4 days before: Dublin, home where you’ve about as much a chance of avoiding a big night as you have avoiding conversations about the recession.

3 days before: Edinburgh, Movember Launch involving a bar bill that listed 99 drinks and a knife fight outside a 24hr shop.

2 days before: Berlin, back in the thick of things in the city that doesn’t let you go home to bed.

1 day before: Frankfurt at the Moustache World Championships where we had to sleep in a car then drive through the night to get home.

Anyway, we weren’t looking our best when we took the photo that morning when we arrived back. You can’t see that so much in lo-res but when Ryanair blew it up on a double spread we looked a fine pair of dipsomaniacs. Plus we both had ketchup stains on our shirts.

EUROTASH – A Journey to the ends of the Upper Lip

Ryanair regulars Steve Ryan and Conor Creighton spent the last three months travelling Europe writing a book. The book takes Europeans and moustaches as its themes. They put it together on such a shoestring that they now look on a bed in a home as about as necessary as a Jacuzzi. This is the story behind Eurotash – a journey to the ends of the upper lip.

Eurotash began one day in inner city Dublin when we ran into a kid called Jason. Jason was still too young to have covered algebra at school, yet he already had two girlfriends. We didn’t understand how until we got up closer and noticed that Jason was wearing that earliest symbol of manhood: a ratty, bumfluff moustache. Clearly, his power over the ladies lay beneath his nose. It set him apart from others and gave him a bearing that raised him above his peers. Jason sparked an interest in moustaches. We researched a little and discovered that the Moustache World Championships were being held in Germany only two months later. With precious little facial hair between us and not much to go on we decided that day that we’d enter the championships. But before doing that we’d travel around Europe and try and find out what sets moustache wearers apart from the baby faced masses. Packing small rucksacks and no shaving foam, we set course for our first stop, Edinburgh.

The Handlebar Club is the oldest moustache club in the world. It was founded in 1947. Simon Whitby Brown (23) is its youngest member. On the day he was conferred to the honorary group, he got a tattoo across his midriff. His girlfriend loves it, he assured us. He also assured us that fat genes didn’t run in his family, so there was no chance of his ink moustache becoming an ink elephant one day.

Down in London we met the president of the club, Rod Littlewood (54). He was also going to the World Championships in Germany. “The Germans take it too seriously. They’re up at 6am with their own stylists getting ready for the competition. I got a German badge made saying ‘I’m only here for the beer’”

But we weren’t quite. We came back to Ireland and flew straight out to Sweden. We were on a tough Ryanair assignment. For five days and five nights we’d have to chase aging rockers in hotrods from one small town petrol station to the next and get their story. But we also had an ulterior motive: we were looking for the legendary Dan Sederowsky (45), a man who had clean shaved just once in his entire life. Dan has the most famous moustache in all of Sweden. Once he fell off the back of a truck and skinned the whole side of his face. “Save the moustache,” he told the doctors before they put him under for the operation.

Unbelievable as it may sound, in Berlin, we actually managed to convince girls to rate our moustaches based on how well we kissed with them. Steve got a phone number, I managed to make my girl sneeze.  One of them claimed to able to grow a moustache larger than ours so we set our sights on finding a moustachioed lady in Germany. Many, many lesbian bars later, we stumbled across a straight woman with a pencil moustache.

Tatjana Bergius (36) is an artist who once worked with the Berlin police force. She looks on her moustache as a way of telling men “Anything you can do, I can do better.” And that she can. She’s very proud of her moustache, as is her boyfriend. One day she envisions a world where beautiful girls will work down the street with fine-waxed moustaches displayed.

On a quick trip home to procure fresh clothes we visited the most advanced waste water treatment plant in Europe. The affectionately named ‘stinkhouse’ sewage plant in Ringsend. We wanted to find out what happens to stubble when you shave.

“Working here doesn’t always make for the best dinner conversation,” say Ciaran O’Ruanaidh (52), chief engineer at the plant. Hair, and various other solids we’d rather not mention on this page, are processed and turned into some of the most potent fertilizer known to man. “It’s all about sex,” he told us. “We need to keep the bacteria at an ambient temperature so that they keep having sex and eating the solids.” They may be simple wastewater treatment operatives to you, but to bacteria they’re no less than love gurus. The fertilizer is then distributed to farms around Ireland. What’s your unwanted stubble in the morning could well be your dinner that night.

David Richardson (54) invited us to his farm for the day to see how the stubble went to work on his cornfields. Human fertilizer while unappealing to the ears or the belly speeds up plant growth like steroids.

Far away from the farm we returned to mainland Europe and ended up on the Polish German border in the company of Estonian truck driver, Aksel Sepp (60). He’d grown his moustache in honour of Lech Walesa. He was the first hippie in Tallinn and used to play a game with friends where they’d sneak across the borders of the Iron Curtain, into West Germany, and bring back Emerson Lake & Palmer records with them.

“Back then there was Russian Mafia at every border with Kalashnikovs,” he says, “It was really dangerous. But back then there was also no such thing as tachometers. You drove until you saw double, and then kept going until you saw triple.”

We didn’t do that. While we may have had to sleep a few nights in cars, we never wound up driving until the two lanes in front of us turned to six.

Our adventure ended one day in September, in a small town outside Frankfurt. As usual we were waking up in a car park. The location for the Moustache World Championships.

Under the hastily constructed banner of Club Ronnie, we’d be competing against 150 of the best facial hair constructions in the world. Our opponents had been up since 6am spraying and blow-drying giant constructions beneath their noses. They had personal stylists on hand. We were also up from 6am, trying to get the heater in the car working so we’d get some feeling into our toes again. In the race to make it on time, we’d both remembered to pack eye masks, but forgotten the more essential sleeping bag.

Seven men entered our category. Wolfgang Schneider (47), the world champion was first onto the stage. He scored a perfect ten. We scored considerably less but Steve did manage to pip the president of the Handlebar Club into fifth place. After all, he was only there for the beer.

Somehow the rumour was spreading around the tournament hall that we’d offered to host the next round of the world championships in Dublin. I blame the Weiss beir. We decided it was high time that we left before we were roped into catering 150 moustache champs and their WAGs. We tucked our fifth and seventh place certificates under our arms and split.

Putting this book together we ran out of petrol, got lost and lived mostly off the food available in petrol stations. We learned a few things. Moustaches get you searched a little more diligently at airports. One in every two girls will probably take you for a gypsy and food will always worm its way north to hide beneath your whiskers. But for all the disadvantages of growing it, we have to say that we never met a bad man, or woman for that matter, with a moustache. That said, we can’t wait to lick our lips and not taste carpet again.