Bubblehammerblog

My friend who lives at the top of the street is a Recreational Services manager with the council, and I sometimes arrange with him the loan of pieces of equipment. Yesterday I was fancying one of the minature JCBs I'd admired earlier in the park, to help me build a frog sanctuary in my back garden. When he let me in they were having a meeting.

My friend the park keeper is also General Secretary of the Peoples and Workers Party (GB), a Pyongyang inspired microgroup. He and the other two local members were preparing for the G20 demonstration on Wednesday, tacking huge pictures of Kim Ill Sung and Kim Jong Ill onto placards, and emptying boxes of great piles of glossy leaflets in Korean. They wore crisp new matching cerise polo shirts, and had been to the barbers.

The story goes that some years ago my friend and neighbour won an open plane ticket from inside a confectionary wrapper. He chose to fly to North Korea because during the 1966 World Cup the national team had played their group matches in our city, and he'd been immensely impressed by them. They had battled courageously, and went on to lift the group Fair Play Trophy.

He was in Pyongyang for over a week, and when he got back he was telling everybody about the worker's paradise he'd discovered in North Korea: beer at 35 pence a pint, massive fishing clubs, sports and social, magnificent parks. After a few pints in the Hangman he'd become particularly enthusiastic, bringing himself to tears recalling the kindness of his friends in the Pulgunbyol District Police. Then he joined, and later became Gen. Sec. of the PWP(GB). His wife would have nothing to do with his 'thing', as she called it. As usual she was sitting in the middle of the couch, smoking cannabis and watching daytime TV.

I paid him £2.50 for a translation of a Kim Jong Ill speech on Human Rights abuses in the USA, and told him I was on my way to make my own arrangements for the G20 demo. As I closed his front door he called out, 'American journalists. Chinese border. Israeli spies'. I didn't mention of course that I was on my way to attempt to retrieve Nestor Makhno's flag.

This was the huge battle stained black flag that Makhno had galloped under when he rode with the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, fighting the Austrians, Denniken, Petlura, and later the Red Army. It had flown above the Gulyai Polya Autonimous Workers and Peasants Council.

Defeated by the Bolsheviks in 1921, Makhno managed to take the flag with him to exile in Paris. After he died the flag changed hands a few times, eventually crossing the channel in the late fifties with the British anarchist and Spanish Civil War veteran, Albert Meltzer. It was now on the top of a wardrobe in my friend's bedroom.

My friend is now semi retired, but was formerly a prominent member of a local anarchist group much influenced by the Norse tradition. The ranks of the once vigourous group have now been decimated by drink, drugs, motorbike accidents and infirmity, but a handful survive, most of them working for the council in one capacity or another.

Makhno's banner came into my friend's keeping, he says, after a 1969 conversation with Albert Meltzer in a pub near Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, where an international anarchist conference was taking place. He agrees that both he and Meltzer were two gallon drunk when he gave him the flag, but he decided to keep it because of the great honour its custody bestowed, and because of the flag's undoubted magikal properties.

Since then Makhno's flag has been raised at many of the biggest actions and demonstrations in Britain, though it saw its last outing at the Orgreave coal depot, during the miner's strike, where the flagpole gained further distinction by being rammed into a police inspector's earhole.

I was going to propose to my friend that I borrow Nestor Makhno's flag to take to the G20 demo. I'd asked him on a number of similar ocasions in the past to make use of the flag, but he'd refused outright. He suspected I might be a Trotskyist. Other political flotsam like me had tried to get their hands on the flag, he said, but he'd fucked them all off.

Before I'd touched his brass raven doorknocker he yanked open his door, saw my face and said, 'No', then he shoved the door shut. It was on a thick chain latch.

'On yer fuckin bike', he growled through the door.

'We should talk about this in a respectful manner, comrade.' I had to shout.

'Told yer, on yer way. Trotskyist cunt.'

'Do I need to remind you that that flag belongs to the entire workers movement?', I appealed.

I heard him angrily undoing the chains to get the door open, then he stuck his beard through the crack, and I saw a pair of lips appear from among the grey and orange scrub.

'Aye, comrade, but not to the butchers of Kronstadt.'

Then he slammed the door shut again, rattling the raven's beak against the wood. I'm planning a final cunning attempt to get my hands on Makhno's banner before the G20 demo. My friend is a notorious old goat, and I'm arranging for a local sex worker to visit him posing as an admirer of Emma Goldman. If this ruse works, prepare to be awed by the flag at the G20.

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