Flying Free Read Free Page B

simple and lovely.
    The man might just as well have said, ‘Why not kill yourselves while you’re at it? That way you can be sure of peace.’
    It reminds me of the blandishments of the ‘peaceful’ people possessed by alien seed-pods in the classic Invasion of the Bodysnatchers :
    Love, desire, ambition, faith – without them, life’s so simple, believe me.
    I don’t want any part of it.
    You’re forgetting something, Miles.
    What’s that?
    You have no choice.
    Many UKIP members see the EU as a SPECTRE-style conspiracy to attain global domination. I seriously believe that, no matter how devious and power-hungry they have become in pursuit of it (just look at the ‘idealism’ of Soviet Communism!), a good 70 per cent of Europhiles are actually motivated by adolescent infection with this ecologically wicked, fuzzy vision.
    The gurdledum song does not represent a philosophy. It is about imagining.
    It is so easy to imagine things. In fact, if imagining, not working the raw, gritty clay of this earth into beautiful and practical forms, were anything more than a diversion, philosophers, artists, musicians, chefs, couturiers, architects and the like could all retire and do something useful instead. Instead, they must devote their lives to wrestling with intractable, resistant materials – like human beings – to give them life and beauty.
    After all, people have imagined horses, carpets, broomsticks and evenbuildings which fly, and very nice too, but, whilst you might invest in an airline or an earthbound thoroughbred stallion, I don’t think you’d be placing your hard-earned cash in a company selling intercontinental flights on Axminster rugs, or giving your beloved daughter a broom and a packed lunch and waving her goodbye from the top of a high building as she sets off for her gap-year in Australia.
    Even back then, I despised the gurdledum song and the insipid, universal niceness which it implies.
    I loved – love – the world in all its manifest diversity and believed – believe still – that ideas and cultures, like species, must compete untrammelled with others for their survival, that evolution cannot and must not be arrested by the imaginings of one self-appointed class in one generation.
    Such overweaning arrogance based on ideal visions – whether by initially well-meaning Christianity, Islam or Communism or by the great empire-builders – has caused infinitely more suffering than just muddling through and evolving at our own natural pace.
    Nations, cultures, clubs and languages all exist for a reason. If you attempt to destroy them before their time, their suckers will merely sprout more vigorously and often twistedly than ever. Supranationalism is a sweet idea. It is also a silly one. No imposed alliance has ever held, just as no one has yet been able to command happy marriages.
    But the gurdledum message went almost unchallenged and unconsidered back then, and a whole generation was to grow up unprepared to try ideas on the testing-ground of argument and intent on destroying precious cultural constructs, habitats and identities in pursuit of a childish fantasy.
    I was already enough of an ecologist to shudder when I heard this ecological wickedness
    I shudder from it still.
    *
    The arguments were as muffled as no doubt the sex had once been. The grief and anger were manifest only in the stutter of the salt cellar on the tabletop, the occasional pan banged that little bit too hard, the light laughswallowed that little bit too quickly, the honed knife-edge momentarily ringing beneath the velvet in answer to a child’s daft question.
    We sensed it, of course, Andrew and I, and like all herd animals exposed to frailty in their leaders, no doubt asked more daft questions than were needed and punished my mother for her inattention by dangerous and downright stupid behaviour.
    The word ‘divorce’ was still terrifying, the