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Thick Skins and Tin Hats

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After multiple false starts, it finally happened. The last day of January 2020 was the date when the country of our birth and nurture left the cradling warmth of the European bosom that had held it for so many years. Previously, the March 2019 deadline had come and gone, our earlier Brexit party had been more a celebration of political incompetence than final curtain. This time nothing could arrest the foolishness of our politicians. Brexit, the reason behind our last 18 months of relocation, renovation and outright effort, was upon us. We were leaving.

Hubris to the right and hubris to the left. Over the previous years, posturing liars driving a downward transformation of our economy and world status were perfectly matched by fantasists led by a man adept only at talking his way into a paper bag. Liberal and European fraternalistic principles sacrificed on multiple altars of, twisted logic, racism, anti-Semitism and rank incompetence.

Of course, for us the game is not over. We are stuck in an existential no-person’s land, at the mercy of attack and counterattack. The dreadful deed, now completed with little in the way of reinforcements or reserves, requires lines of barbed wire to the front whilst our rear is open to the encroaching forces of deregulation, chlorine and unaffordable medicines. Beyond the wire, potentially reprisal fodder, stand those of us still wedded to the European ideal but through accident of birth now fair game for our erstwhile allies. Innocents in the crossfire.

During our last 18 months we have made many new friends of all nationalities. Mostly, unfortunately, our non-British neighbours regard us with incredulity. They seek explanations which we find hard to elucidate. It is as difficult for us to explain cultural prejudice as it is rank incompetence. Almost impossible to talk about the false gods of colonial memory, about misplaced anger from those left behind, the gullibility of the desperate and the insidious power of a press tethered to the desires of billionaire proprietors.

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We will steadfastly pursue our dream through this nightmare. Hold close our beliefs in equality and fraternity. Establish a home in the heart of an ancient settlement where French friends welcome us, bestow gifts on us from their gardens and seek to include us in their multiple societies and associations. Helping to breathe additional life into a community, to give as much as we receive and to avoid the stereotype of the Brit holidaying abroad as if the rest of the world was merely a temporary playground, to be abused and soiled as an act of modern conquest.

It will cost us more than we had anticipated. Reciprocal arrangements on healthcare are likely to detonate as collateral damage. Freedom of movement will be curtailed. It will be harder to assure our French administrators that our intentions are pure and not associated with the poisonous bile coming from across the cliffs of Dover. 

But we will strive on. Our personal worlds will not be reduced. We just must be careful now. Our words and behaviours will be judged more harshly. We will need to be more gentle but also firm when talking to those encouraged by watching our leaders, who assume we are in step with them. But we will do it. Because our European future goes well beyond the myopic utterings of a country now so lost to us.

We ‘remain’ believers in the power of community, the strength of diverse peoples and the security of friendships. Our country may be foreign to these ‘others’. On January the 31st 2020 it became more foreign to us too

Thick skins and tin hats.

Les Clés de la Maison

The TGV from Paris Montparnasse to Bordeaux flies along at just shy of 300km an hour, covering the nearly six hundred kilometres in little more than two hours. The landscape, burned brown by the just abated heat wave such that the furrowed fields were rendered indistinguishable from the bleached grass, flashed by. Apart from the speed and the scorched earth outside, the journey seemed oddly familiar – travelling families, backpacks, insufficient luggage space, incomprehensible seat numbering systems – reinforcing a welcome sense of continuity on our journey into the unknown. For this was the moment of truth. This time we were picking up our keys.

Half way between Paris and Bordeaux the landscape changed, as the countryside became more undulating, large swathes of woodland appeared more frequently and the first green ranks of vines appeared. Still, the sun shone down out of an unbroken blue sky and emptied irrigation ponds lined the tracks. Unlike the UK, the great European drought of 2018 still had France in its grip.

However lyrically one tries to observe, record and describe life passing by, the prosaic reality of life soon butts its nose in. Sure enough, crushed between travel bags attempting to eat a French take away lunch proved less than incident free. Having safely navigated a ham and cheese baguette, the strawberry tartelette that followed proved a little more tricky, spilling sticky glaze onto both my travel journal and myself.

Not to be undone, Ann then proceeded to spurt fruit salad juice liberally over the same journal. This brought to mind the infamous occasion when, I having just become the proud owner of a brand new MacBook Air computer laptop [notice the future-proofed writing there?], in the process of opening an individual sachet of train milk, Ann gave my brand spanking new keyboard a liberal milk bath. The lesson I had not learned of course is never to travel with precious things and Ann together. She is an expert in launching food products where they are not normally best appreciated. If you ever invite her round for dinner, avoid asking her to pour the wine.

As the train sped along at an unfeasibly rapid pace, lorries and cars seemed to crawl along the motorway running alongside us, like shiny carriages from a bygone age, polished up for some state carnival. By car, the journey would have taken us a very long day, if not days. Instead, here we were being sped towards our destination in a suitably advanced manner, a metal tube transporting its human cargo, including ourselves, to destinations unknown.

An apposite description so it appeared. We only had vague ideas about the future, our ability to remain in France past B-Day 2019, our proclivity or otherwise for improving our language skills. These were important questions to ponder but first of all something more pressing. Most of all, we didn’t know where to find the keys to our new French life, last seen in the hands of the French estate agent, Jeanette. There had been vague arrangements to meet us the next day, but these had been undone in an email to the effect that Jeanette had decided to take time off and would leave the keys in a bar in the next village.

The phone rang. “Hello, it’s Jeanette. I am not in the village. I cannot leave the keys. What shall I do?”

Existential Refugees

In 2018 I decide to seek refuge away from my native land. To become, in essence, a refugee. I was not fleeing from conflict or for economic advantage, although impending economic disaster was the constant backdrop to my plans. No, I became an existential refugee.

I don’t know if there is a formal existential refugee category, but if not then perhaps that is another example of rejection. I apologise to other types of refugee. I haven’t been tortured, seen my family raped and murdered, nor have I faced starvation or vanishingly faint opportunities for employment. On anyone’s hierarchy of human needs, most of the basic ones are met.

Without wishing in any way to imply moral equivalence to those who flee from persecution and terror, through millennia there has been another factor that has have driven migration, pushing people to uproot themselves, cross borders, arrive in uncharted territory; leave all that is familiar and safe behind.

Equating familiarity with safety is not an entirely self-satisfied first world conceit. The drip, drip, drip of insecurity can build up into a flood of anxiety as the waters rise inexorably, submerging the familiar landmarks that bind a person to their culture or country.

Having spent 20 years evolving a European identity, my country decided that it did not share my sense of who I was. Indeed, the most senior politician in the land of my birth told people of my ilk that we were “citizens of nowhere”. We begged to differ. Suggesting that accident of birth does not bind you to a land, we preferred to be boundaried by political action not happenstance. This did not make me a citizen of nowhere, but it certainly led me to doubt that I could remain a citizen of England.

So we decided to become citizens of somewhere, a somewhere that might grow to love us as we loved it. This is our story, as we race to beat the gathering storms of Brexit – such a hateful and hate filled term – and gain a foothold in a continent that still equates geographical with political definitions, where cooperation is prized and where friendship was seen as the best hope for a collaborative future world.

And that somewhere? That somewhere was France.