Thursday 24th July

Young people are travelling, holidaying and working all over the world.   When I was a boy hardly anyone ever left the town, or if they did it was to one of the villages around, or maybe to the big town Ipswich.  I ran away from home and school, as far away as I thought I could get, London.  But actually that is only about 80 miles from Suffolk.  Seemed a long way back then.  And my friends who I had left behind used to ask me what it was like up there in London, in the Big Smoke.  Well, if truth be told, not that different really.  A lot more foreigners, black and tan and all colours, but they were much the same as those I had left behind.  My own children have likewise spread out a bit, but have stayed in England.  My sister has two daughters, one is in Amsterdam and the other in Hong Kong.  Young people see the whole world as theirs to explore and even live in.

It is quite common for youngsters to take a year or two out of their education and travel the world, whereas I never considered it.  Too busy surviving to even think about a career, let alone seeing the World.  But now, just as London is full of foreigners, so too every city everywhere is the same.  And that must be for the good.  Wars and hatred are most often engendered by ignorance and fear of foreigners; as if they were really different from us.  The appeal of UKIP is mostly to older people and those living outside of cities, they did appallingly badly in London itself.  I hope that this trend continues and the lines between nationality keep being blurred, so that it really doesn’t matter where you came from but where you are going.   We are again stuck with a xenophobic government, picking fights with Europe and now with Russia.  What is the matter with us, try co-operation for a change.  People are far more like us all over the world.