“We are going to get back to our ‘art de vivre’ and recover our taste for liberty,” President Macron told France on June 14. A month later, I took the train-under-the-water from London and found that, indeed, the Parisians are resuming their usual pleasures. Masks are worn widely on public transport and in shops, but a sense of […]
The weeks and months following Brexit are taking those of us who would have preferred the UK to stay in the EU into strange new territory. While politicians and technocrats get on with working out the practicalities of the UK’s relationship with Europe, the question for us ordinary Europhiles is: how to remain European? On […]
Tallinn! Baltic tiger, pioneering digital society, birthplace of Skype! Few places have made such a successful transition from Soviet communism to European prosperity as the capital of Estonia. The contrast with my second city, Tirana, could not be greater. I’m hoping, in this final research trip for A Tale of Three Cities, to get a sense […]
Next week, I’m leaving Britain to spend a month in the second of my three cities – Tirana, the capital of Albania. As with the other cities I’ve chosen for my research into a state-of-Europe book, it will be my first time there – something which will help me to see the place with the […]
Last month a group of thirty European thinkers published a manifesto in several British newspapers calling for the urgent need to defend “the idea of Europe” against the rising populism sweeping the continent. Clicking through from the Guardian article to the manifesto itself, it struck me forcibly how little it will resonate with a British […]
This month, just after the darkest point of the year and at what is still the darkest moment in British politics of my lifetime, I’m setting out in search of light. I’m going to Cadiz on Spain’s Costa de Luz – the Coast of Light. In one sense, I’m indulging a typical northern European longing […]
In the interesting times that have been unfolding since the EU referendum, Britain is seeing the emergence of a new identity. A new cultural-political identity is being forged by British Europeans who feel a strong affiliation with the continent by virtue of background or cultural affinity. It’s an identity that’s growing out of a sense […]
As the new hunting season gets underway, so too the latest phase of the campaign to persuade the National Trust to stop issuing licences for trail hunting on its land, as reported here. Earlier this year I resigned my membership of the National Trust, a decision driven in part by my helping to foster fox […]
Packaging, fellow-plastivists remind me, is not just about plastic. The current zest for over-packaging involves a range of materials, including paper, all carrying an environmental cost. One particularly bad example comes via the sale of hot drinks on trains, which I was reminded of on a recent GWR journey. I was sitting in the same […]
Britain is a divided nation. Some of us hate foxes; others of us love them. It’s a split reflected in the literature on which we grow up, from the sandy-whiskered trickster in Jemima Puddle-Duck to the enterprising altruist in Fantastic Mr Fox. In modern Britain, foxes seem to get the brunt of our ambivalence about […]