The Great Referendum

I have kept quiet about the coming Scottish Referendum because  I have considered this is a matter for the Scots alone.  But as polling day looms it has suddenly hit me that what is proposed here is the breaking up of the United Kingdom, an entity to which I belong and have engaged in with taxes and benefits and voting over the past 64 years.  The United Kingdom is as much mine as anyone else’s yet I am to have no say in a proposal which will produce changes that will be profound in their consequences.  My life will be changed as much as anyone in The Highlands or Cities of the Kingdom of Scotland .  And for what it’s worth, I do not like change.  Even if the financial projections  are true (which is unlikely, they seldom are)England will be poorer  in so many other ways: intellectually (said without any sense of irony), creatively and psychologically.  Intellectually we lose one of the powerhouses of thought which produced and still underpins the whole of the British Enlightenment and later with leadership of Welsh and Irish thinkers and politicians the whole project of the Welfare State.  Creatively we lose a whole history of combined artistic endeavour; England would look different without the ideas of, for instance, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, No less in industry where the English and Welsh landscape and infrastructure as we know it owes a vast debt to the work of the great Scottish Engineers.  Psychologically the United Kingdom is an island.  We look outwards to the world with the sea in every direction.  We are, and always have ben a land with the open sea to gaze at.  We have come this far together; we have had great adventures on the way. Let us not now divorce in some rash, ill-considered parting of the ways.  How poor, how infinitely poor, if we both become hemmed in by a border and half the horizon cut away.

Don't try to Come here on Holiday

Somewhere between the North Sea and the Bristol Channel lies an island. Not over large but big enough to contain a couple of towns, a number of villages, hamlets and farms and all the other bits and pieces that go to make a place like that: crumbling cliffs, litter strewn beaches, deserted churches, closed down quarries used as landfill sites and a preserved railway run by solicitors in boiler suits. Along with the usual complement of dingy tea-shops, paint-peeled hotels and rain-sodden caravan sites. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the place. I love it. For a writer it provides enough material to last many lucrative volumes . And the views are spectacular. But I wouldn’t want publicity to spoil it. I don’t want you, dear readers, getting up charabanc trips to clog up our already sclerotic lanes trying to discover the true identitiy of Mrs. Vest’s Tea Rooms or whatever.
People I meet at receptions and literary luncheons have tried to ferret out just where this place is and have resorted to goading me with clumsy prompts over dinner to see if I could be made to let slip some clue. There have been those who have stated categorically that this island must be Romney Marsh or Chichester and Selsey Bill. Some have argued for the tip of Cornwall or Salcombe and Start Point or, even, The Isle of Wight. There’s even a University department in Wisconsin or Kyoto or somewhere which keeps e.mailing me with suggestions that the island might be a metaphor for post-colonial Britain, wherever that is, but I never rise to the bait - it might be none of the above. Or bits of all of them.
One thing I will admit, though, the people are all real. The characters in the stories are all people whose names I know and you’d find them all on The Island. These are folk I might bump into in Safeways or The Post Office. Of course, I’m not so stupid as to make them identifiable in any detail; I’ve taken the precaution of adapting occupations, circumstances and hair colour. So there’s not a chance you would be able to identify them and I hope to God there’s no chance of them recognising themselves. And there’s no point in trying to link characters with the place I live because that’s Dorset (England, Europe) and there are no islands here.