back on when the cloud had passed.
In the Lancaster’s bar, Liam decides that we should all go out and have ourselves a night on the town, or at least on the parts of it that aren’t being torn down or rebuilt. This notion is scotched by the hotel’s security staff, who seem concerned that we may end up staying in Beirut rather longer than we’d planned. “Not safe,” they say, making that Mediterranean finger-waving gesture beloved of Italian footballers disputing offside calls. By way of compromise, Giz is dispatched to reconnoitre a nightclub around the corner. “Not good,” he says, on returning. “Old blokes in suits with really young women, and everyone wearing lots and lots of gold.”
Liam gets the drinks in. Keith goes to bed.
BY BREAKFAST TIME on Sunday, The Prodigy have left the building, departing Beirut on the early flight. Mat from the NME , the lawyer type whose camera caused all the trouble at the gig and I have stayed,
determined to do some sightseeing. This is less easy than it sounds. It could be said that Beirut has not yet come to terms with the idea of tourists wandering around it for its own sake, especially if you were trying to win some kind of award for understatement.
We explain to a driver from the hotel that we’d like to see Beirut’s peace monument. He doesn’t appear to have heard of it, which is a surprise, as we’d have thought that a seven-storey high sculpture made of tanks and concrete would be a hard thing to miss. One of us has a picture of it in a guidebook, which we show him. He charges off into Beirut’s genially chaotic traffic.
The peace monument, the work of a French artist called Armand Fernandez, was unveiled in 1996 outside the Lebanese Ministry of Defence complex on the outskirts of Beirut. It consists, as we’d explained to our driver, of a couple of dozen tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery pieces stacked on top of each other and held into place by a tower of concrete. It is every bit as bewildering, ugly and ludicrous as the civil war it commemorates.
Naturally, we wish to photograph this monstrosity. Our driver asks some soldiers standing nearby if this is permissible. Armies are supposed to operate according to a chain of command; the Lebanese military has a chain of indecision. The soldiers don’t know, or don’t want to decide, so they go and get their senior officer. He, in turn, goes and asks a completely different bunch of soldiers, who go and get their senior officer, who asks the first soldiers the driver had spoken to.
After a lengthy discussion, a verdict is reached. We may take photographs of the monument, but only from one of three preordained angles, lest we accidentally get any of the MoD buildings themselves into our pictures. This is only reasonable, given the undoubted havoc my family and friends could wreak with underexposed, badly framed long-distance shots of a nondescript office block.
On the way back to the hotel, we pass the racetrack, where a meeting is in progress. We decide this looks like fun, and ask the driver to come back in a couple of hours. We stand amid the entirely male crowd in the crumbling grandstand and watch the horses go round the red dirt track a few times, admire the picturesque backdrop of shattered buildings for a bit, completely fail to decipher the betting system, get bored, and resolve to leave.
“No,” says the guard at the gate.
What?
“No,” he repeats, indicating that we may not leave the course until after the day’s racing is complete. There are still four races to go. We’re bored now. We make to push past him.
“No,” he says, again.
“Don’t be silly,” says Mat, and tries to prise his hand from the gate.
“No,” he says, again.
We do a bit of standing around looking impatient, folding and unfolding our arms and stomping our feet. After a few minutes of this, the guard relents and asks us to follow him. He leads us back inside the course to the on-site police
In the Lancaster’s bar, Liam decides that we should all go out and have ourselves a night on the town, or at least on the parts of it that aren’t being torn down or rebuilt. This notion is scotched by the hotel’s security staff, who seem concerned that we may end up staying in Beirut rather longer than we’d planned. “Not safe,” they say, making that Mediterranean finger-waving gesture beloved of Italian footballers disputing offside calls. By way of compromise, Giz is dispatched to reconnoitre a nightclub around the corner. “Not good,” he says, on returning. “Old blokes in suits with really young women, and everyone wearing lots and lots of gold.”
Liam gets the drinks in. Keith goes to bed.
BY BREAKFAST TIME on Sunday, The Prodigy have left the building, departing Beirut on the early flight. Mat from the NME , the lawyer type whose camera caused all the trouble at the gig and I have stayed,
determined to do some sightseeing. This is less easy than it sounds. It could be said that Beirut has not yet come to terms with the idea of tourists wandering around it for its own sake, especially if you were trying to win some kind of award for understatement.
We explain to a driver from the hotel that we’d like to see Beirut’s peace monument. He doesn’t appear to have heard of it, which is a surprise, as we’d have thought that a seven-storey high sculpture made of tanks and concrete would be a hard thing to miss. One of us has a picture of it in a guidebook, which we show him. He charges off into Beirut’s genially chaotic traffic.
The peace monument, the work of a French artist called Armand Fernandez, was unveiled in 1996 outside the Lebanese Ministry of Defence complex on the outskirts of Beirut. It consists, as we’d explained to our driver, of a couple of dozen tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery pieces stacked on top of each other and held into place by a tower of concrete. It is every bit as bewildering, ugly and ludicrous as the civil war it commemorates.
Naturally, we wish to photograph this monstrosity. Our driver asks some soldiers standing nearby if this is permissible. Armies are supposed to operate according to a chain of command; the Lebanese military has a chain of indecision. The soldiers don’t know, or don’t want to decide, so they go and get their senior officer. He, in turn, goes and asks a completely different bunch of soldiers, who go and get their senior officer, who asks the first soldiers the driver had spoken to.
After a lengthy discussion, a verdict is reached. We may take photographs of the monument, but only from one of three preordained angles, lest we accidentally get any of the MoD buildings themselves into our pictures. This is only reasonable, given the undoubted havoc my family and friends could wreak with underexposed, badly framed long-distance shots of a nondescript office block.
On the way back to the hotel, we pass the racetrack, where a meeting is in progress. We decide this looks like fun, and ask the driver to come back in a couple of hours. We stand amid the entirely male crowd in the crumbling grandstand and watch the horses go round the red dirt track a few times, admire the picturesque backdrop of shattered buildings for a bit, completely fail to decipher the betting system, get bored, and resolve to leave.
“No,” says the guard at the gate.
What?
“No,” he repeats, indicating that we may not leave the course until after the day’s racing is complete. There are still four races to go. We’re bored now. We make to push past him.
“No,” he says, again.
“Don’t be silly,” says Mat, and tries to prise his hand from the gate.
“No,” he says, again.
We do a bit of standing around looking impatient, folding and unfolding our arms and stomping our feet. After a few minutes of this, the guard relents and asks us to follow him. He leads us back inside the course to the on-site police
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