We weren’t in such a hurry to get home to Bruges that we couldn’t linger just a little over a simple breakfast by the yacht port in Honfleur, and while lunch, like our breakfast may not have been the most gastronomic of affairs, it was indeed made all the more palatable by the view over the Bay of Somme. Our life in a postcard.
We almost gasped as we rolled over the hills outside Calais and caught for the first time, that view of Dover. We have always known it was there of course, but have never seen it and suddenly the lack of distance between that Brexit mob and the rest of the EU became astonishingly clear. At that precise moment we were much closer to England than we were to any other country.
A little later we did actually gasp as the informal refugee camps rolled past at one hundred and thirty kilometres per hour. Hundreds of people living in the open without water, food or money, many without shelter. Surviving on air and a prayer it would seem. If they are as some would have it, just looking for an easier life, and this is it, then it’s a bit hard to imagine what the one they are running from was like. We have no solution but it is quite clear that there is nothing right about any of this. Our postcard world is quite different from the one in which they subsist.
6 comments
Walking a few hundred miles in their shoes might help us to go back to basic humanity
Yes, makes you realize how little we have to be disgruntled about, yet we still are.
Your postcard world says something about how you view things and I love it, but yes, the refugee camps are a sobering and sad sight. For me it was a shock to see squatter camps in France even more desolate than those I witnessed in South Africa. Not right in any country, but somehow even more disturbing in Europe. I'm with Rob here.
Yes I agree with you all, we may be powerless to change things in a sense, but we mustn't ignore the situation either.
Really horrible and so often the supported view of those who call themselves Christians! Peter if you've kept up with the goings-on in Australia this week you would have heard that they only needed to call themselves "au pairs" and they would be considered - mind you they would need to be white, christian and european to have made the grade.
Ahh Penny, I try to avert my eyes when I hear of "goings on" with "au pairs" - but sadly I did hear. As a person of privilege living in another country legally, I am ashamed that the country of my birth does not afford others that courtesy, let alone those who actually have few options ... I had better stop!
Post a Comment