Irony Day

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Mr Cameron emerges from Downing Street, looking grave, gets into his car, and is driven off at speed to save the Euro.

‘There he goes,’ says a rather breathless news anchor.

The irony hangs in the air like smoke: the leader of a Eurosceptic party must now battle to rescue a currency he is passionately glad the country has not joined. In fact, there are so many ironies I run out of fingers.

‘It’s Interest Day,’ says a financial reporter brightly, which does not mean a day full of fascinating things, but the day The Bank of England sets the interest rate, and sneaks out that bit about £278 billion of quantitative easing. (Or: printing money, as Andrew Neil likes to say.) I think actually it is Irony Day.

The awful thing is, Blighty can’t really do much. Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy are running the show. Sarko is patently, blatantly, the junior partner, which I think angers him, so to compensate, he gets furious with Mr Cameron. The truth is, all the Europeans at these series of emergency summits are livid with Britain. This is, I think, for a set of very complex psychological reasons.

It is, partly, because Britain is generally a mildly Eurosceptic country. In politics and the media, there are the hard-liners, who talk all the time of Euro-madness: straight bananas, the banning of imperial weights and measures, the renaming of the great British banger. But even Ordinary Decent Britons have a vague sense of unease at the idea of a kind of democratic deficit.

A lot of the scare stories are pure Euro-myth (the sausage was actually in an episode of Yes, Minister.) Some, however, are true. I particularly rue the loss of the 100 watt light bulb, about which I, as a good citizen and dutiful voter, was not consulted. It was in no party manifesto; the benefits of that directive to the environment have not been satisfactorily explained. The throwing back of millions dead fish into the sea to accord to European fishing quotas is not a Daily Mail nightmare, but a horrid reality.

These kind of objections are not little Englander harrumphs, but perfectly legitimate. My sense is, though, that some of the fury of the Europeans comes more from the fact that Britain refuses to share their great Dream.

One can understand this. Imagine you came up with a brilliant idea. It was a huge idea. It was founded in the most humane principles, and affected matters of life and death, morality and ethics. You had every reason to have stars in your eyes.

And then someone came along and grumbled and sometimes mocked and occasionally even laughed and pointed. They just did not get it.

The Dream of Europe is much more than bureaucracy and working time directives; it is the end of war. That was the founding principle, which now gets lost in all the sound and fury. It was, in many ways, a marvellous dream. It was a reaction to the horrors of the Second World War; it was Europe’s way of saying Never Again. How could anyone be against that?

I think too the crossness is exacerbated by what the shrinks call projection. I imagine Britain can be quite annoying, in its consistent, low-level scepticism. But it is not Britain’s fault that the Euro, and by extension, the whole Union, is now in crisis. The guarders of the great Dream have done that themselves.

One of the things I have never understood is how anyone let it get this far. The warning klaxons have been going off for years; yet no-one stood up and said, hold on one moment, something must be done.

I think there are psychological rather than practical reasons for this too. I think that because of the power of the Dream, many European nations went into a kind of denial. Our wonderful, shining idea is so perfect it must work, it shall work, something so great cannot possibly fail. It’s a bit like the belief that the Titanic could never sink.

It may also be the very human yearning that wishing and hoping can make a thing so. Humans have the ability to be extraordinarily irrational; it is why people play the lottery with their lucky numbers, believe in horoscopes, say good morning to magpies. (My dad had a tremendous superstition about hats on beds; I like to think of myself as an empiricist, but I cannot quite shake off a little shudder if I see a Trilby on a divan.)

If the Euro goes smash, the various European governments and policy-makers have themselves to blame. This must make them feel awful. No wonder they are lashing out. No wonder Sarko is yelling at Mr Cameron to shut up. No wonder he shouts: ‘we are sick of you criticising us.’

If it were not so serious, the sight of prime ministers and presidents rushing about like headless chickens at one vital summit after another would be comical. I have sympathy for them. That original, founding dream was a beautiful and gleaming thing. But in some ways, that makes me just as cross as they are. Come on, elected leaders, I want to yell; you were supposed to be better, cleverer, quicker. How could you let it come to this?

*********************************************************

Well, there you are. I had been threatening a meaty, political post, and now there is one. It's rather a sad one, so I am giving you lots of bonus pictures of the Pigeon looking particularly pretty to make up for it. Never let it be said that I don't do light and shade.

There are wild gales bashing and buffeting around the house; when I opened the door for The Second Walk, her ladyship took one look and refused to go out at all.

Because of the weather, I only had time to take a few very quick snaps before I was driven back in by the storm. So here they are.

Even on the wettest, windiest, muddiest day, the beech avenue still retains its majesty:

The mossy wall is a beacon of solidity in a buffeting world:

The Pigeon has her serious face on. I love how in certain lights she almost comes out dark blue:

It was getting very blowy by now, and a horizontal rain was starting. This is her I'm really fed up with this weather now face:

In lovely black and white:

Pondering the nature of the Universal Why, which is a good thing to ponder on this strange day:

The hill, almost lost in the murk:

Quickly pressing publish now, as the wind has gone insane, and the lights are flickering, and I am afraid the power lines might go down. I knew I should have got in more canned goods.

Oh, and this post is dedicated to The Beloved Cousin, who is currently catching up with the blog. 'More blog,' she writes on the email, which makes me very happy. I may have taken her instructions slightly too much to heart. Tomorrow there shall be pith.

Not really about Greece at all

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I was going to wade into a whole thing about Greece. I have been telling you an awful lot about my life lately, and it is high time I swished about my soi-disant credentials as a citizen of the world. I have no idea where this citizen of the world idea came about, but it is something I have had stuck in my head since I was about eighteen. In my addled mind, it has two essential elements. One is that despite different cultures and customs and local mores, people have more that unites them than divides them. It’s a bit mushy, I freely admit, but I like to think the human heart knows no borders. And secondly, I feel a perfectly inexplicable duty to look outward, and not get trapped into an insular, island nation state of mind.

So, I get an odd guilt when I just bash on endlessly about the garden and the dog and the hills. I must have serious opinions about world events, especially when the world is so very strange. I have no notion where these internal imperatives come from, but I must obey them.

Greece, I thought. Come on. It’s the only story in town. It’s the most incredible, in its literal sense, story in town. The idea that one small nation could effectively hold the world economy to ransom seems almost too curious for my small brain to take in. Possibly the repercussions might not be felt in Indonesia or Brazil, but if Greece goes smash, the shattered pieces of the Euro dream will shake the mighty behemoth of America, as well as all of Europe. Poor battered old Blighty, with her shaky 0.5% of growth, will almost certainly fall back into deep recession. Banks will totter and fall. Consumer confidence will crash through the floor, lending will dry up, stock exchanges as far away as New York and Hong Kong will shudder and sway.

I was going to be snarly and cynical. What does that Greek Prime Minister think he is doing? I was going to write about the reaction to his decision to call a referendum on the bailout deal in the House; how the Indian Prime Minister curled his lip; how Sarko and Mrs Merkel are tearing out their hair. I was going to write about years of incompetence and corruption.

Then I thought: hold on. I thought of the people living in Greece, and how they must feel. They are in the worst crisis since the war. There are no good options for them. And then some superior British person comes along and starts pontificating about their government. It suddenly seemed like insult on injury.

One of the oddest things about nationality is how it can feel a bit like a family. I can bitch and moan about my relatives, but if someone from the outside were to do the same, I would rise to my family’s defence like a tiger. So it is with Britain. I can complain about the government, or national absurdities, or societal weaknesses. But if I hear a foreign voice on the radio being critical of the British, I get prickly and defensive. This is entirely irrational. In the same irrational way, I get a mad gleam of pride when I hear someone saying something kind about us.

There was an excellent programme on the World Service the other day about The Establishment: what it is, how it has changed, whether it even exists any more. The Britons interviewed were, quite rightly, rather scathing about the remnants of the class system and other anomalies which allow Oxbridge to dominate the corridors of power. I did not mind that at all. It was within the family.

Then a thoughtful German correspondent called Thomas Kielinger came on. I’ve heard him before on Radio Four, and he is always incisive and fascinating. He could have torn into the oddities of The Establishment, but he chose instead to be polite. He said the thing he noticed most about those Britons who rise to the top of politics and journalism and the arts is how broad their intellectual reach is, how antic and interesting their conversation. He said it was what he enjoyed the most about working in London.

This had nothing whatsoever to do with me. And yet, I felt proud and pleased. There is no explaining it.

So, I’m not going to go sneering at the Greek government. There are plenty of economists and international experts and Euro commentators who are going to do that anyway. The Greek people are having a perfectly ghastly time. I am not going to intrude on family grief, with my gimcrack opinions and my cheap shots.

This is why I would never have been any good at being a columnist. In the abstract, I believe absolutely in the right to give offence. It’s a great British tradition; it’s one of the glories of Private Eye; it’s a central tenet of freedom of speech. But in the particular, I think: I’m not sure I want to put words on a page that might fall like a new blow on a fresh bruise. It’s ridiculously mimsy, and I’m not especially proud of it, but there we are. That turns out to be my admission of the day.

 

Pictures of the day:

More autumnal hills:

Almost my favourite of the little beeches:

For all that we are in a riot of ambers and scarlets, there are still amazing patches of green. This is the philadelphus on my dry stone wall:

The very last leaves on the rowan tree:

Carpet of leaves:

The lovely hydrangea just keeps flowering:

As does my tiny sedum cutting, which I hope is going to survive the winter:

Sometimes this dog is so sweet and funny I really don't know what to do. This morning, she decided to amuse me by posing next to the marjoram, so it looks as if she is wearing a flower in her hair, like Carmen Miranda:

And then she did her OHMYGOD OHMYGOD Is That A Rabbit face:

The sky had clouded over by the time I got to the hill, so it sits, rather regal, under the violet murk: