My part in the (class) war….

Posted on April 28, 2008 by bobpiper

The Guardian are asking, Were you there in 1968? Now, I realise a good many of my readers were not even born back in ’68 (I don’t mean you, Harry) but I can claim a
presence at two of the momentous events of the Spring of 1968.
In March I went down to Grosvenor Square to join in the protests about the Vietnam war. It was a pretty scary experience, and I spent most of the time either dodging the police, or dodging the nutters who seemed to think the police should allow us to storm the US Embassy and be shot on sight.
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In May I went with some friends to Paris. Now, I could pretend that I was part of an underground revolutionary cell entering occupied Paris to show solidarity with the student revolutionaries in the Sorbonne, drinking dark coffee by day and rioting by night. But truth be told, We’d booked it for months, a week away with the lads, on the lash, in Paris. It sounded like a good idea… at the time we booked it. As it turned out the City was under curfew and we spent the days drinking Watney’s Red Barrel which I swear had been there since the liberation of Paris, and the nights huddled in the hotel (which didn’t have a bar). If we dared venture out early evenings we were met with the hostile glares of the thousands of police and troops gathered in armoured vehicles waiting for the whistle to blow and the revolution to recommence.
Ah… the good old days, eh?

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5 Responses to My part in the (class) war….

  1. Ernesto says:
    April 28, 2008 at 12:21 pm

    Sorry, the validity of this post has to be called into question.
    You drinking WATNEY’S RED BARREL!?!?
    I just don’t believe it!

    Reply
  2. newmania says:
    April 28, 2008 at 1:46 pm

    a week away with the lads, on the lash, in Paris. It sounded like a good idea… at the time we booked it
    Yeah yeah…we were only in Iraq for the big chapattis….So you are actually a bourgeois poseur and you smear it with a veneer of proliness interesting . I think a picture of you at that time would tell us all we need to know. Did you or did you not have long hair?

    Reply
  3. Bob Piper says:
    April 28, 2008 at 4:06 pm

    I’m not sure exactly what point you are making, newmania (no surprise there then, eh) but whilst I would love to have said I was in Paris to foment the revolution, I was only there on the piss with some blokes from school. My locks were positively flowing… although I fail to see what that had to do with anything.
    Ernesto, it was that or that fizzy German muck, I’m afraid, (you can’t get a decent pint of Speckled Hen in Paris, you know) although 24 hours on the bog meant I should probably have tried the German stuff.

    Reply
  4. Harry Barnes says:
    April 28, 2008 at 7:30 pm

    As our son was born in May 1968, I was little more than a spectator (via the media) of the events in Paris. Besides a decade earlier when I was marching with CND, Nye Bevan had warned us against emotional spasms.

    Reply
  5. Bob Piper says:
    April 28, 2008 at 10:00 pm

    You should have listened, Harry. You might have been more cautious in August 1967.

    Reply