The EU And Memoirs

Exmples

One counter example can destroy a thesis but one good example can iluminate a point. Way back in July 2012 I described the example I'd been searching for but never until then found to illustrate the Year 2000 computer problem. Now I think I have the example Iwant to illustrate the immigration dilemma. The focal point was a discussion we had in the English conversation class on the subject of immigration, at which a full range of views was expressed. My example is as follows.

If soemone knocks on your door late at night, cold, wet and hungry, you can if you are kind let them in, dry them, warm them up and feed them, before sending them out into the big wide world again. Over a period of, say, a year, you could do that a hundred times or more without seriously disrupting your life or that of your family. It helps if the incomers know and respect your way of life but a few who don't shouldn't present a major problem. However, if 100 cold, wet and hungry people all knock on your door at the same time, then you have a problem however kind you are. The problem is exacerbated if they don't know your culture. That, I think, is a main part of the current immigration problem in a nutshell.

EU Referendum

So the referendum on Britain remaining in the EU will take place in four months' time. I am in favour of Britain staying in, in part for some very selfish reasons. I greatly value my life in France, helped in no small part by various cooperative agreements between Britain and France made through the EU. If Britain opts out I can apply for French citizenship since I already have the basic qualifications but having those is not necessarily a guarantee of acceptance.

I often criticise the EU in these posts and don't retract any of the criticisms. I think the EU is badly in need of radical reform. I haven't been paying much attention to David Cameron's negotiations as I have regarded them as largely irrelevant but he does seem to have gained an important point: the national power of veto against any further steps to increase political integration. In fact, I suspect that he gained this point because many other countries in the EU want it for themselves. The EU bigwigs undoubtedly want an EU as integrated as are the states of the USA but I doubt that is possible and, more importantly, I doubt that the people of most European countries want it either.

I'm not able to comment on the economics of Britain being in or out. They are as opaque to me as they seem to be for even qualified commentators. That is obviously a most important question for Britain but much less so for me, although it concerns my children. I think that the very best things that the EU has achieved have been arrived at through close cooperation, cooperative agreements rather than integration. And I would like to see the EU achieve much more of the same, as I think it can do. To do that, however, it will have to undergo reform and I think Britain could play an important role in pushing it towards that. The link between the EU commission and the people of Europe has been broken and needs to be repaired. That is a role I would like to see Britain play but it could do it only from inside the EU.

Memoirs

I have decided to write my memoirs and am a fair way through doing so. The idea occurred for three reasons. Firstly I suggested to a friend the same age as me, who had had an interesting childhood, that she should do so for her grandchild. Secondly, I have just finished reading a book, Stoner, a fictional biography of an inconsequential American academic which proved a good read. And thirdly I am interested in gauges of how much the world changes between generations, for instance between my mother's generation and that of my children. My mother lived in her early life some 50 miles from the sea but got to see it only when she was 17; she was in her 40s when she first went abroad. I saw the sea when I was too young to remember and first went abroad when I was 16. My daughter first went abroad and saw the sea when she was 9 months old, in France, and had her first birthday in California. 

Another example is when I was talking to friends and their 14 year-old granddaughter on the terrace outside the Bar du Pont.  The granddaughter had a mobile phone and I asked her if she knew it had a small computer inside it.  She did.  I said that when I had first worked with a computer in 1965, one much less powerful than that in her phone, it would have been too large to fit in the whole of the Bar du Pont and its terrace.  She had difficulty believing that.  Those kind of perceptions get lost between generations.

My memoirs will not be for publication, on paper or electronically. They are for my children (and me). I hope they will offer a clarification for them of why I am what I am and some insights into how the world was before they were born.