I'm half Welsh and one of my relatives lived in Tredegar, which I remember as a child being a pit and a lot of houses clinging to an almost vertical mountain side. They had a little shop near the top and I have vivid memories of being told I could go and take whatever sweets I wanted. And an Eagle Annual (early days), but most of all the miners singing Calon lân as they came off shift, their helmet lamps like fireflies in the dark. My mother was Welsh and my father was English and I was brought up in England. But I went often stay on my own with my grandmother in a remote house with no electricity a few miles from Dowlais. I roamed the hills. I dropped stones down mine shafts. I felt the first tremors of love for a girl called Myfanwy, who lived in a village called Pantywain (long since bulldosed).
Later, as a writer, I've worked with lots of people in Germany, Austria, Italy, France, the Netherlands. I think my early experience in the foreign country of Wales helped me to see other cultures as something to embrace - not quite so different as first appearances suggested. Before that I found, in Africa, that I had more in common with black Africans than my compatriots - and like the miners before, despite poverty and awful circumstances, they could sing, oh how they could sing.
I ramble on like this simply to show that I believe it's better to come together - that lines on the map defining borders are mostly relics of arbitrary past wars - that the attempt at least, despite its failures, to unify Europe after two disastrous conflicts, is better than a retreat into isolationism. I cannot see any compelling economic reasons for leaving the EU - on the contrary. I would very much have preferred us to stay in and argue each case. Many will disagree, but I think that the rather unpleasant press we have fed a succession of lies (it never was £350m, for example) to a people wishing for an end to austerity.
I hope that's calm enough. I don't hate, or dislike, anybody I've met in San Stef who voted Leave. I think that they were cheated, deluded, sold a bag of deceptions. They keep telling me it will all be wonderful eventually but don't appear to have any concrete plans for how to achieve it. I'm not a Moaner. I'm sad at the insult to my friends in Europe. I'm sad that the country which fought the Nazis to secure peace in Europe has retreated into being an insignificant blob on the map.
Topic: Brexit and all that rubbish (Read 52059 times)