Local things

Embroidery of a local landmark by my grandmother, Chrissie Allison

In the first few minutes at Schiphol it was hard to think I was in another country. Everything looked the same. It was nothing like arriving in Kano airport in the 70s where the heat, the night air and the different smells hit you like a wave. 

Was there any security there? I asked dad thinking perhaps we had just been met by a military official and walked to a car. 

Oh yes, he said. And it was slow. Then he said: A lot of the mothers - many of them army wives - used to go back to the UK at half term to see the children at boarding school. They would get a bus together from Kaduna. Once, when they got to the airport they were asked if they wanted to buy a boarding card for 200 Naira (about £150 in the 1970s). They had already paid for their tickets. After that the military arranged for a lieutenant colonel to accompany future airport runs. 

They made a straightforward local fix to a local problem.

My first feeling at Schiphol made me wonder: Is this the “New Europe” - we are all one? All our differences fading, blurring, merging? I would be much happier with that clear and definitive scenario than the current EU that seems to drift under the banner “ever closer union”. 

I’d like us to be one - no borders, barriers, fewer and fewer reason for disagreement and fights over power and land. How easy things might be if countries in Europe had streamlined economies, health, education, judicial and transport systems. I don’t worry too much that we are all too different for that and that our different ideas of say justice would make things impossible. I don't believe that is true.

A Dutch friend, Wil, said recently: Europe works: I was in Romania 15 years ago and saw children driving their animals in carts with nothing but potatoes and tomatoes to eat. I was there five years ago and what difference. 

- The fact is it's less about your idealised state and more about who pays for who, said dad. 

- Look at Poland, I said quoting my friend - already a powerhouse - and twenty years ago, who would have thought?

- But the Greeks he said, dangerously, hamming up a devil's advocate to which he didn't expect a reply. Will they ever pay? 

I thought of a Greek I'd danced with. We had been talking about men learning to dance tango socially rather than in class.  Men won't dance as women in my country he said. Not in the milongas anyway. He described how well dressed the men were attending the milonga, how well they danced, how he, a new though for me very good dancer quailed at the thought of going to milongas in his own country. The way he described it the air seemed to hum in a very non-British way with ideas to do with machismo, honour, pride and respect. It reminded me of the sense I'd had from the practimilonguero videos or in the lyrics of tango songs of descriptions of Buenos Aires in the Golden Age.

Given that, I suspected being the poor man of Europe was tough enough for the Greeks and that the sense of shame, never mind the debt must be crippling. Besides, taking the long view, consider what their culture has already given the west. When they are back on their feet, one day they will probably help someone else.  They already are.  Despiting their own straits they are rescuing sea-borne refugees.

The countries in the EU may be economically unbalanced but probably not for long. I like that we are sharing what there is in Europe. I like that in some ways economically things seem to be going that way with the democratisation of the marketplace through initiatives like eBay, Airbnb, Uber and Liftshare.  We in the EU are not so incompatible so sharing is easier.

If the EU had countries like Kuwait, one of the most democratic countries in the Middle East things might still be harder. In a milonga just before Christmas I spoke to a woman from there who referred several times to tribes. Marriage for example was until recently and perhaps still, determined along tribal lines. She was one of the most liberal Kuwaitis I expect to meet yet she seemed to have foot in the modern Western world where women work and drive and go out and a reluctant foot in a world of stricture and control that many women in the West could not tolerate. The concept of tribal alliance in her mind was still very near. We are not like Syria, Lebanon, and these countries she said meaning I think those places that used to be referred to as the Levant.  They were always more progressive. When in the west do we ever think of tribes? The Picts, Etruscans, Scythians? In western Europe that ended at least a thousand years ago. More often we mean two thousand years ago and more. It might not be so easy to "be one" with a culture like that.

Europe together is strong and stands for many good and liberal values but I don't know in fact if that one European state I say I prefer to the current European Union is in fact the way to go and the way the EU probably does want to go. Homogeneity can and does stifle creativity, diversity and can erase the distinctive traditions and ways of life that form local identities. If you doubt this consider how much regional variation in accent has disappeared in the last hundred years or even just since radio and television. 

Dad was sceptical about this. Yet, I said you told me when you came back from Borken (Germany) in 1950 that for those next five years in York you went from speaking German to falling in with the ‘tha’, ‘thee’, ‘thine’, of the other local kids.  

"Tha thinks thasen clever just cos tha fither's a copper."  When as children my brother and I begged dad to 'speak Yorkshire' this was the phrase I remember.  He always smiled.

I did, he said. And I thought it was a throwback even then. I couldn’t quite believe it when I first heard it. I think you're making the same mistake. I'm sure they still say it. But I lived in York for over four years in the early nineties and didn't hear it then.

I think those regional variations in language at least are already, have already died out. I can remember as a child under ten begging to hear old Harry - a man in probably his nineties - who had come in to the village, perhaps from the countryside of north eastern Scotland from the way he spoke. I was taken by my grandmother to his house on the High street where I sat on the rug in front of his hearth with a lot of others in the room. He chatted and joked to those assembled and I was astonished to understand hardly a word though I had been familiar since birth with the local accent and expressions you’d be more likely to hear locally than on the television. Like what?, said my son. Oh, like ‘dinnae fash’. I said. ‘I’m fair scunnert’. ‘Messages’ for ‘shopping’. Things like that.

In Buenos Aires I chatted several times with Alejandro. He was a mix of Italian and Argentine and spoke in a constant mixture of castellano, Italian and English. He had lived all over the world including in several European countries in one of which lived his child. He liked Spain best but he wasn’t impressed by the way he saw Europe going. When they give me ham now in Italy, they give it with plastic gloves. Ma, va! he said with disgust. It’s hard to object to good hygiene but I understood what he meant. 

Overhearing a few words of Dutch reminded me I was certainly in a different place. Esperanto was never really a goer. You can change the transport people use or the laws passed by those they elect but when people have choice they may choose based on efficiency but they often choose idiosyncratically. They choose things that have meaning for them and those things are often rooted in old ways, things related to childhood, thing associated with love, security, family, friends and identity. These are things on a small scale. 

If the countries in Europe became a single state would that diversity, those local languages, traditions remain? Would they strengthen? Or would they go the opposite way? I think about the Basques, the Catalans, the Corsicans, all forced to be part of something they say is not to do with them. Yugoslavia broke up. Kosovo is still disputed. Then there’s Brexit. In these cases people seem to be saying we want to be who we are and are objecting: who we are is not in essence part of something else. There is no point in apportioning blame in these things.  The way forward must be - at least for good neighbourliness - through dialogue and understanding why people feel the way they do.  Neighbours, like ex-spouses, like bordering countries always do have to negotiate over things so it's as well to do so on good terms. Besides it's interesting as well as useful knowing why people hold the beliefs and opinions they do.

Who wants a local identity of Amazon, KFC, Starbucks and empty high streets?  It always struck me that a Swiss libertarian friend seemed to hate the thought that in many ways he is bounded geographically even while he travels a lot.  He believed rather that his identity was to do with his beliefs and his affinity with those who share them.  No surprise then that his home for many years has been London. But he like everyone is shaped by childhood experiences and simply where you live in life.  So a lot of our identity is in fact helplessly to do with the traditional food we may have eaten, the walks we take, the music we hear, the customs we adhere to and the local projects we are involved in.  This is what we call culture.

Local identity is about what is unique, the local organisations, the one-off shops not the chain stores.  One such is the family-run Braithwaites (est 1868) in Dundee - that have become local institutions. 

Braithwaite's in fact has only ever been in two locations. It used to be in the the Pillars (also known as the Town House), another Dundee institution built in the eighteenth century and knocked down in the 1930s to make way for...a square. It is remembered now in a few models, if you know where to look:

Identity is tied to the much-loved places we visit with friends and family and has roots in local history, stories, legends. I think some of us feel a corporate, bureaucratic Eurostate threatens those small, local, things that were made more by people and traditions than by governments and corporations. People don’t believe it should need some Euro stamp of authenticity to protect them. 

No local community means people don’t care about each other, don’t look out for vulnerable neighbours, local charities don’t have volunteers. Replicated this means without these small, essential supports a National Health System can’t really cope with those same people yo-yoing in and out of hospital. 

Could our local, national and international systems be in better harmony? Governmental decisions shouldn’t just be about accommodating local things. Shouldn’t it be all about local things? Shouldn’t the movements of the macro systems be determined by what works locally because that is what most affects people? Shouldn’t strong village community or neighbourhood councils have as much if not more focus and power than town councils? At the very least they should not be ignored and patronised and have things done to their communities without a by-your-leave.

Can you in fact to choose to keep some special, local things and make new things under a new one state system or is it more that the things we consider precious appear and disappear as a result of circumstance? If that is true isn't keeping those things and allowing the creation of new ones more a question of creating and fostering the kind of small, local environment in which such things thrive?