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village had one back then and provided casual employment for him or her before the state tidied them into its solicitous bins) and every kind old lady foolish enough to ask me how I was, all heard at length my views on ‘abroad’, on which I was now an expert.
    Abroad (except for sausages which were just mean) was good.
    I have never changed my views on that. I have spent a huge part of my life – working and leisure – on the mainland of Europe, enjoying the food, the company and the diverse cultures and exploring the churches, the battlefields and the people.
    It would be many years before I began to explore Britain with the same enthusiasm and so came to marvel at the astounding diversity of culture, landscape and language contained within our own shores.
    And that, of course, has been another major factor in my battle against the growth of the European soviet – the love for Europe’s astoundingly rich diversity and the respect for each cultural phenomenon, each custom, rite, dialect, foodstuff and cultural or genetic characteristic which has grown naturally from its very special and very peculiar environment. Each, it seemed to me, deserves to be protected no less than each local species of flora and fauna.
    They are already threatened by globalisation of course – my Lisbon airport now boasts a McDonald’s and a Pizza Hut and offers Lacoste,Swatch, Tie Rack and all the other usual brand-names which render it indistinguishable from any other airport in the world. That, until a major upheaval, is an unfortunate and inexorable fact of life.
    But as every other man-made union of nations in the world fragments agonisingly back into its constituent parts – the USSR, the states of the Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia (even Italy’s union now hangs in the balance and I am none too sanguine about the United States); as our own home nations (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Cornwall…) assert their autonomy and demand self-determination; as even the smallest regions promote the integrity of their home-grown foodstuffs and identities amidst the homogenising tide – now a strange group of bureaucrats and outdated idealists seek to smear them all into one featureless landscape.
    They call it a ‘level playing-field’.
    Just think of that.
    Mountains, hills, moors, pastures, deserts, coastlines, fishing-grounds – all levelled (and marked with ‘No Dogs’, ‘No Smoking’ and probably ‘No Heavy Petting’ signs) so that orderly men in cities can play a silly game according to man-made rules.
    I knew even then that I wanted diversity to thrive.
    I did not know – I would not have believed – that anyone would try to take it away from me.
    *
    I should have known better.
    In 1971, a whimsical little ditty called ‘Imagine’ appeared. It preached the hateful message of globalisation by imperialistic homogenisation. ‘If we can get everyone to believe the same things and feel no loyalties, wouldn’t life be sweet?’ was its Victorian missionary’s message.
    No matter that, if someone had penned a song called ‘Let’s get rid of all species except rabbits’, or ‘Who needs any food but McDonalds or any language but English?’ it would have been quite properly derided, this song was to become an almost universal mission-statement to a war-weary world.
    You know the one. It begins quite promisingly. The piano goes ‘gurdle gurdle gurdle gurdle dum’. Then the dirge-like singing starts and the sugar-coated imperialism kicks in.
    Get rid of all your diverse human ambitions and passions (and so, presumably, art and personal loves and standards). Get rid of all your nations, possessions, faiths and loyalties (and so, presumably, families, languages and diversity in habitat, custom and culture), get rid, in short, of your identities and of everything that makes you human, and everything will suddenly be oh, so