I have concluded this: living in, and visiting, other countries gives you a better perspective of your own.
Singly or as a family I lived in the USA (six years), intermittently in France where for a decade we owned a house, six months in Singapore on national service, two weeks in Germany on family exchange. Plus three month-long holidays in New Zealand, independently touring. And many weeks of independent touring and villa rental in France.
As a journalist and for professional reasons I visited France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, Venezuela, Finland, Ireland (north and south separately), USA, Canada.
Living in the USA was a youthful adventure which sort of aged. When Brexit loomed I was too old to consider anywhere other than Britain even if VR had agreed. In any case no country is perfect and one chooses the best compromise. While I was still working Sweden tempted me but not its climate.
But if you’re living a compromise you dwell on the bad bits and Brexit spotlighted them. Before, I’d never felt ashamed of the country I was born in. But now I realised it was rightwing. Not the familiar Tory/Labour divide but rightwing as in parts of fascism. Remember immigration and the referendum.
I’d joked about Britain’s insularity, reckoning it grew out of the country’s monoglottism. But Brexit revealed genuine hatred of other countries; read The Daily Mail, Britain’s most successful newspaper.
Of course I can still visit (albeit with more hassle) the countries that introduced me to Mozart, Balzac and Michelangelo. But I’m no longer part of them. A minor matter. Stop whining, RR.
I try very hard not to comment on blogs about the politics and internal workings of countries not my own; however, this one is a heart breaker.
ReplyDeleteYou say we were alone in 1939 and just to emphasise I would add that I recently watched an offering: The Darkest Hour on Netflix; not one of their best efforts. But it brought home how very much alone we were at the time of Dunkirk left with no really effective army, and meagre and inferior armaments and as near as dammit defenceless and not another willing friend in the world. We were frighteningly vulnerable and if an attack had been pressed home it could so easily have been a different story. "Lest we forget."
ReplyDeleteLet us remember peace in Europe has now lasted 75 years.
I empathise as far as I can from my own experiences in France. I similarly have a strong affinity to Scotland having climbed 282 of their mountains where I have always been received with hospitality and friendliness, and whilst I admire their independence the thought of them becoming detached from the UK and me having to show a passport and possibly looked upon as one of the guilty is abhorrent.
I too feel shame.
There is a horrible coincidence that you face Brexit tonight at midnight, and we face our Senate voting to acquit the President here without calling a single witness to testify. There is an unraveling of norms, a shock of the times, and a new level of fear for the future. I'm whining too, RR.
ReplyDeleteColette: Feel free to comment. It only requires wit, intelligence, political nous and a comparative view of history - and I know you're well equipped in those departments.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: Yeah, but Dunkirk wasn't presented like that at the time; read contemporary headlines and you'd think it was a triumph - everyone got home unscathed. However, if lying raises morale go ahead and lie. But don't get found out.
robin andrea: Tell me what key you're whining in and perhaps we can fashion a duet.
I whine just as much about Trump as I do about our lot. I feel enfranchised to do so, he's a worldwide infection like Carona (the name of an orange/lemon squash in the UK). Have you ever thought what God thinks about DT? That he might approve? Remember when the Nile ran with blood, frogs fell from the skies and first-borns had an attack of the heebie-jeebies.
RR-- I wish I knew what key I am whining in lately. I'm sure we could harmonize though. I'd give it my best. About God and DT... well, I am a non-believer in any deity, but if there were such a thing... a God, I would hope it would look at DT and use whatever powers s/he had to render him utterly powerless in every way.
Deleterobin andrea: One argument in favour of Windows 10 - and yes, I'm aware of many that aren't - is the free inclusion of a recording/playback feature which is blissfully easy to use. With it I confirm my worst suspicions about the state of my voice. You may buy yourself a set of tuning forks and go to work on key identification. This recommendation falls apart if you no longer use a PC.
DeleteOne of the suspiciously brisk rules about writing fiction is: Write from what you know. A few seconds consideration reveals this to be nonsensical. In effect it is another way of saying: Don't use your imagination. Luckily there are one or two authors, all of whom I'm sure you have read, who disobeyed this stricture.
I was aware you are a non-believer. People who contribute comments to Tone Deaf have the widest freedom, always assuming they don't recommend cucumber. My God/Trump invitation wasn't looking for "truth", for that I would have emailed the Archbishop of Canterbury. Rather something fanciful. God introducing DT to Satan and the quiffed one saying of the forked-tail one: "Y'know he's got a point. Is he free for the Supreme Court?"
Please don't be shy. I have an excess of that quality.
You say "like that" as if my comment inferred that the public were given a rosy picture. The film and I were both emphasising the opposite which was the case as you rightly point out, but which I had already made.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: I wouldn't say "rosy" but at the time Dunkirk was seen as a success and reported as such in the newspapers. 338,226 Allied soldiers evacuated, many by the "small boats", in the Miracle of Dunkirk. However, many thought Dunkirk was very much a mixed success; yes we got the soldiers back but we left behind a huge amount of what military folk call matériel (at a time when when replacing this would have been difficult) and that sending the troops into France was misguided and hopeless in the first place. And that this was hardly news.
ReplyDeleteAfter all Churchill, in the HoC, speaking at the time, said: "...we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations."
But I go on to say that government lying (ie, propaganda) at a time of extreme national danger is perhaps understandable. There is no point in terrifying the public with the truth when there is nothing much the public can do about it. Sustaining national morale can be a murky business.
The German armed forces high command had no qualms about Dunkirk and announced the event as "the greatest annihilation battle of all time".
Hitler was even more specific: "Dunkirk has fallen! 40,000 French and English troops are all that remains of the formerly great armies. Immeasurable quantities of materiel have been captured. The greatest battle in the history of the world has come to an end." However it is interesting to see that Hitler fibbed with that quoted figure.
Juicy reply, Robbie. This is you at your best. We all learn something in the process, and come away with good historical quotes.
DeleteIt feels odd and cold, this brexit business. Suddenly, the UK looks like a tiny island in the North Sea - while it was always so keen to stand separate from the Continent, now it's suddenly not even Europe.
ReplyDeleteI have lived three times in the UK and none of these experiences were wholly positive but I came away from them with a strong bond, strong enough to cherish your literature, your news media, your films and music, your tv, your countryside and so on (but not your food).
My first experience was early 1970s in grim Grimsby where I spent a gruesome couple of months as an exchange pupil (one of our English teachers went to university with the then headmistress of the Grimsby Comprehensive). Coming from the economic miracle land, and a modest middle income family, I was struck, nay shocked by what I felt was poverty. I lived with a similar middle income family but I had never been to a home without a bookshelf or running hot water. It turned out that the bedroom I was given was the parents' bedroom (they slept on an air mattress in one of their kid's rooms. I had never been to a home where the TV was on during dinner (which was served on trays while we kids sat on the carpet) - that and school uniform was clearly too much for my spoilt arrogant German psyche. But eventually, I loved it all - or most of it with the exception of the WWII jokes that were thrown at me daily.
In the late 1970s I found myself working for the ILEA, teaching in a Brixton primary school as part of an exchange program of my university. London of course was amazing and I had the time of my life - apart from the WWII jokes (yawn) and the open racism most of my colleagues expressed towards their non-white pupils.
In the 1980s, we lived and worked for a while again in London (Kingston) and little had changed, the same WWII jokes (forever that thing with the mustache and the marching steps) and now, coming from Ireland with my Irish family, the endless harrassment when arriving at Holyhead where my husband was questioned every single time upon entering (Irish and beard = terrorist). In the end, we had enough and decided to work elsewhere. We enjoy(ed) visiting thorughout the years, still struggling with your food, but I am a sucker for your tv drama series and oh yes, the films and Brit pop.
Seriously, I love all of it.
Apart from the UK, where I lost count of how often, I have only once been greeted with the hitler salute and that was from a rikshaw driver in Jodhpur.
We've been around the globe and trying hard to remember I must say, I have nowhere else experienced any of the hostility towards Irish people that we met with - open or underhand - in your lovely country.
But apart from that, stay calm and carry on.
Sabine: My heart goes out to you re. the monotonous, unfunny tormenting. No doubt when these oafs had ground to a halt about the war, they slipped in something about the 1966 World Cup. Oafishness definitely, but a sort of raggedy pathos too; one had the feeling that these emotionally crippled bottom-feeders rarely, if ever, left these shores.
ReplyDeleteAnd you lived in Kingston while we did (1972 to 1998). Latterly on Tudor Drive. If you ever took the 71 bus to Richmond you would have passed by our house, second from the end on the southern side. Had I known, you could have waved and I could have made a placatory gesture to say: we're not all like that. Were you to drive past our house here in Hereford I could bawl you a fleeting line from Liebst du um Schönheit, a song which is a placatory gesture itself but this time towards feminism. It was written by Clara Schumann.
It means a lot me that, despite everything (Grimsby, forsooth!), you noticed one or two advantages in our riven land. My enthusiasm for Germany (more particularly, Germans) continues and I wish I'd devoted as much time to improving my German as I did to my French.
Not so sure about calm, it does have a terminal state.