Wide Ranging Discussion

By 7.40 nobody had turned up for the meeting. I knew Hannah the churchwarden was singing with a choir, and Daniel the Treasurer was away; I wasn't aware that Alan our friendly plumber had the lurgy and so wasn't coming. Then to my surprise the bell rang: it was Cal, one of the younger members of the church, who'd been delayed by traffic. Usually he's the one from this particular committee who has to be reminded of the meetings, if anyone is. I hadn't spoken to him for a while and big things have been happening to him so I invited him in for a short chat anyway, and he wanted to ask about a very vague plan which various people have mentioned to repair or replace the existing choir and servers' robes which date to the mid-1970s. In the course of this I very incautiously alluded to the fact that, as regards this matter, church members were quite likely to know what they didn't want, but not what they did, a bit like Brexit. Now, I had never given any thought to what line Cal might take on this matter - that of the UK leaving the European Union, I mean - but I am now left in no doubt at all. 

We spent quite a long time, in fact, discussing the absurdities of the situation Britain finds itself in and the various influences which have resulted in said absurdities, before moving on to the iniquities of the European Union. Back in the days of the Referendum Il Rettore relayed the quip of a member of Lamford's congregation that the country seemed evenly divided between those who thought the EU was awful and we should leave it, and those who thought the EU was awful and we should stay in it, so though I may have found myself in the latter camp I am not blind to the institution's failings. I imagine nobody is, even those most deeply involved in it. But it slowly became clear that Cal's attitudes were undergirded by a single basic assumption, that the British are self-evidently good, honest, hard-working, law-abiding, and fated by Nature to succeed, while everyone else - the fundamentally dishonest, shiftless, benighted nations of Europe - is motivated by jealousy of this happy state, and has devised the EU as a means of binding and frustrating the natural destiny of Britain. Of course he didn't state this straight out, or I could have discussed the history of the European Coal and Steel Community and how nobody ever imagined in the beginning that Britain would be part of it anyway; instead it emerged slowly through a catalogue of particular injustices, and it took me a while to twig.

This is a mental environment which seems so weird to most of the people I interact with a lot of the time that I rather appreciated the opportunity to be exposed to it. At least it's not immigrants that seem to be the problem. About an hour after he arrived, I saw Cal off, and poured a gin.