Rangers

Between 100,000 and 150,000 Glasgow Rangers supporters came to Manchester for the UEFA Cup final last Wednesday. They started arriving – and drinking – on Tuesday. They booked out every hotel in the city and those who couldn’t find rooms camped out. By Wednesday afternoon, blue and white face-painted Scots were rolling up and down Oxford Road, draped in Union flags. They bought cases of beer (one each) and were drinking in the squares from before 9am, more than 10 hours before kickoff. The council had relaxed the no-drinking by-laws because they knew they couldn’t stop them, but the city was happy to have what seemed to be good natured visitors who turned the city into what was called ‘Mac-chester’. The council set up large screens in different locations, provided with portaloos, and it was all one big party.

But it didn’t take long to turn very, very sour. Colleagues reported them singing sectarian songs during the day, although this got little mention in the post-riot media coverage. The trams were stopped by 2pm for the supporters’ own safety because they couldn’t clear the crowds from the tracks. By the early evening, one of my students said it took her an hour to get home through the crowds. Along with many local passers-by, she was abused by the Scots and one of them even took a swing at her head. Luckily he was too drunk to connect. And this was a long way from the trouble in Piccadilly Gardens.

When the main screen in the Gardens went down due to technical trouble at the start of the match, some supporters started throwing bottles at the screen and the television technicians. While the council was providing transport for half the 20,000 crowd to a screen at another venue, the police came to stop the trouble. Then it turned into a small riot, with supporters attacking the police and the police charging into the crowd. The trouble extended up Oldham Street, where rioters smashed a car and a dozen of them trampled on a policeman. It went on for some hours, with local residents chased into their apartment buildings. Others were sheltered by the staff of closed restaurants.

The next morning, different media gave competing accounts of who was to blame. One channel blamed the police, another the supporters, another the city council, and some in Glasgow claimed it was a Celtic conspiracy. But everyone seemed to agree that it was only a few hundred people who started the trouble. But whatever the nature of the violence, the state of the city afterwards suggested that it wasn’t just a couple of hundred people who caused the damage. Piccadilly Gardens was covered in – and a I quote the local newspaper – ‘urine-soaked rubbish’. They were cleaning it up with a bulldozer. Several people told me that the next day much of the city centre smelled of urine and vomit.

As for the match itself, Rangers were dreadful, and lost 2-0. Good.

Vini Reilly

I saw Vini Reilly at Pizza Express. At lunch time today, I was returning videos on Lapwing Lane and as I left the shop, I saw him sitting on his haunches in the door of Pizza Express, smoking a cigarette. He had very large headphones on, and was nodding quietly along with the music. Even hunched up he looked like a collection of odd angles, with a long face that you can’t mistake for anyone else.

Vini Reilly is the Durutti Column and released albums through Factory Records. He played guitar with many other groups, not the least being with Morrissey on his first solo album.

Website: http://www.column.freeuk.com/index.htm

Bilbao and Oñati

Bilbao is a great city. The museum is clearly fabulous, but the rest of the town has a great feel about it as well. It is a former industrial city, so it is no museum of pre-modern times with obvious tourist appeal. Instead, it is an ordinary but thriving city with a very human appeal to it. The food is excellent - lots of seafood and great coffee - the public transport is good, and in the evening the locals walk in the park and talk animatedly with each other.

Oñati is a beautiful small town about an hour south of Bilbao by bus. It's up in the hills, which surround the town. I took the photographs on a short walk in the countryside one evening. It's very pretty, although it wasn't too easy to frame the powerlines out of the shot. The Institute where the workshop was held was built in the 16th century, a beautiful building where the warm sun filled the courtyard in the afternoons. It is a pleasant, old Basque town, where the walls of the buildings are decorated with ETA graffiti. The food in the local restaurants was also excellent, although we drank too much local red in the bars late into the evenings. No, not really too much.