We may be leaving the European Union soon, but our involvement with it, good or bad, goes back to just about every era, and it is not especially a matter of drinking each other’s wine or swapping holidays, but the history of each other’s victories or alliances and shifts of people.
My closest friend at school married one of what biologist Peter Medawar called “Hitler’s gifts” – the tide of skilled and excellent men and women, often Jewish and German or Austrian, who longed to escape from Nazism, who needed to find almost anywhere a place where they could worship in peace. The man who married my actual Church of England best friend from school was a brilliant Jewish historian from Austria.
They are both dead now, my schoolfriend’s funeral only two weeks ago, in the crematorium in Golders Green, north London – an area whose community is well known for having a variety of faiths. We are starting to worry now about too many immigrants who may be flooding our island space, but mixing the ways of thinking and doing things can be all for the best.
And the worldwide connection of the internet means that it will be just about impossible to keep all ways of thinking and caring absolutely remote and unknown from each other.
We may realise that we had better accept and respect ways of thinking, eating and praying that are different in uncountable ways from our own. Who knows, we might even feel like changing our harbours and habitats ourselves.
What do you think? Have your say below
