Postcards to Europe

Genres: Anthologies

Synopsis

This is not a book about politics. It is a book about what makes us British, and what makes us European.

Spend time with some of your favourite writers and artists in this truly unique collection spanning everything from art, language, food, music and movies, to war, literature, driving, nudity, geography, smoking and nature.

Featuring pieces of exceptional quality from some of our most treasured novelists, historians, journalists, poets and artists, including: Jessie Burton, Richard Herring, Alain de Botton, Tom Bradby, Val McDermid, Matt Haig, Afua Hirsch, Lionel Shriver, Sarah Perry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Ian Rankin, Owen Jones, Mark Kermode, Robert Macfarlane, Chris Riddell, Former Prime Minister Jim Hacker and many more.

A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the times we live in, our relationship with the continent, and ourselves.

* * * * *

INCLUDES PIECES BY:

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Tom Bradby, Jessie Burton, Ben Collins (aka The Stig), Colonel Tim Collins, Robert Crampton, Adam Dant, Alain de Botton, Kate Eberlen, Matt Frei, Nicci French, Simon Garfield, Jonathan Lynn writing as Former Prime Minister Jim Hacker, Matt Haig, Richard Herring, Jennifer Higgie, Afua Hirsch, Owen Jones, Oliver Kamm, Alex Kapranos, Mark Kermode, Hari Kunzru, Olivia Laing, Marie Le Conte, Amy Liptrot, Robert Macfarlane, Henry Marsh, Val McDermid, Ian McEwan, Hollie McNish, Kate Mosse, Jenni Murray, Sarah Perry, Ian Rankin, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Chris Riddell, Andrew Roberts, Will Self, David Shrigley, Lionel Shriver, Sunny Singh, Ece Temelkuran, Rob Temple, Bee Wilson, Sarah Winman

Release date: November 16, 2017

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

DOUBLE RAINBOW



Richard Herring





RICHARD HERRING is an award-winning English stand-up comedian, comedy writer, podcaster, playwright and diarist. He is the author of Fist of Fun (with Stewart Lee), Talking Cock, Warming Up Volume I: Bye Bye Balham, How Not To Grow Up, Warming Up Volume II: The Box Lady and Other Pesticles, and Emergency Questions.



It’s amazing we managed to stay together for so long. Great Britain was like a puerile younger sibling to the cool, sexually confident, cigarette smoking teenager of the Continent. We must have been an embarrassment when we turned up sniggering at double entendres while you were trying to party with your sophisticated peers. And yet you cared enough to forgive us our immaturity and try to guide us towards a future where we finally grew up.

But we threw our toys out of our pram because we couldn’t accept that the world didn’t revolve around us.

Here’s a story that summed up the difference between us. I should have known we were bound to break up. I was on a skiing holiday in Austria with my wife and daughter. I didn’t want to go skiing, I had never done it before and I knew I’d be terrible at it, and I was correct. It was horrific.

Firstly you put on boots that are so tight that every movement you make for the rest of the day is like being tortured on a rack. Then you are transported up a mountain, which you are expected to slide down on some sticks. You fall over, you might ski off a cliff, there could be avalanches and it’s freezing cold. The only good thing about the whole experience is when you get to the end of the day and take the boots off. It’s just such a beautiful release to no longer be in constant agony that it almost induces euphoria. I wanted to shout, ‘Thank you for freeing me! You have made me appreciate how wonderful my life is. I will never complain about anything again.’

On the final day of the vacation I told my wife I wasn’t going back. She was fine with that. The hotel had a luxury spa and she wanted to go for a sauna. I can’t understand the pleasure in this either. You go into a tiny wooden box which is unbearably hot and it’s impossible to breathe, which is how it must feel to be buried alive. I just want to go on a holiday where I am a normal temperature. Is that too much to ask?

My wife wanted to look round the spa, so she told me to meet her in the sauna. I have been married long enough to know that I must do as I am told. I went into the leisure-tomb wearing my swimming trunks. I am a normal English man and would never have considered wearing anything else.

Thirty seconds later the door opened. I thought my wife would enter, but instead a European lady of about fifty-five years of age walked in. The thing I noticed about her immediately was that she was completely naked: no swimming costume, no underwear. She didn’t ask my permission to disrobe she just waltzed in, smiling at me and saying ‘Hello!’, as if being naked was the most natural thing in the world.

Then she lay down opposite me with her bottom bits smiling up at me, like some kind of end-to-end flesh-coloured double rainbow. I didn’t know where not to look. I’d have gone red and had steam coming out of my ears, if I hadn’t been in a sauna so that was already happening.

Then my wife came through the door. What was she going to say? She’d only been gone a minute and here I was in a compromising position with a mature European. But my wife recognised that this was something sophisticated and Continental, and being one-eighth Norwegian wanted to appear sophisticated as well, so she acted as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on. But there is nothing sophisticated about not sniggering like a schoolchild when presented with an unexpected noo-noo. You could see this lady’s chuff. The whole thing. I’m guessing. I wasn’t staring at it. But it was hard to avoid. It followed you round the room. It was like the eye of Sauron.

I was forty-eight at the time and perhaps I should have been able to take a stranger’s tuppence in my stride. But I am British and embarrassed enough by my own raddled genitalia. I wouldn’t foist that on a stranger and I felt awkward that someone had presumed to show me theirs. I had to leave. Out of embarrassment. Are you seeing why I am making this analogy?

It was only once I was out of the sauna that I saw there was a sign saying it was hotel policy that you HAD to be naked in the sauna. The rules had been clearly displayed all along, but I had failed to notice them … After all this it was I who had committed the social faux pas by hiding my pocket-rocket away. The lady must have thought I was so rude – why wasn’t I swinging my penis round like a helicopter? What had she done to offend me.

It also said that anyone under fourteen wasn’t allowed into the sauna. Thank God. But that meant anyone fourteen or over WAS allowed in the sauna. I’d been mentally scarred by this as a man of nearly fifty, imagine if the fourteen-year-old Richard Herring had been in there. The only vagina I’d seen at that point had been in a torn-up copy of Fiesta that I’d found in Shipham woods. And I had nightmares about that for twenty-three years.

I voted Brexit because of this. We don’t want to be a part of that. We’re better off without the Europeans if that’s their concept of normality!

To be fair, that’s no more ridiculous than the reasons that anyone else voted for Brexit. It’s pretty much the only one that still stands up. They should have put that on the side of a bus. That woman’s nether regions looking down on us all, saying ‘Is this what you want?’

Our repressed nation isn’t ready to hang out with you Gauloise smoking Europeans. I hope, in a few more years, we might be.

WHY THE FIGHT IS SO BITTER



Alain de Botton





ALAIN DE BOTTON is the author of fifteen books which have been published in thirty countries. He was born in Switzerland in 1969, and came to England to boarding school at the age of eight. His first language is French, his second German, his third English. In 2008, he founded the School of Life, which has branches in London, Antwerp, Paris and Berlin. He is very sad about Brexit.



The debate about whether and how the UK should leave the European Union should be one of the most boring of all in politics, involving as it does arcane discussions around tariffs, import duties, rebates, fishing quotas for mackerel and the rights of banks to sell eurobonds across national borders. This should be the sort of stuff of which the unread back business pages of newspapers are made.

Instead, the debate on Europe has become – in the UK at least – an issue which divides families, splits couples, destroys friendships and strikes at the heart of personal and emotional life. People are going into psychotherapy with the presenting problems simply being: Brexit.

How has an issue around the minutiae of trading rules become an issue over which people define their identities and determine their personal lives?

Because leaving the EU isn’t primarily a political or even economic matter. It is first and foremost a cultural one, by which is meant, a debate about what sort of people the British should be, what sort of values they should live by, what they should hold dear and, quite simply, how they should live.

Beneath the technocratic arguments of Brexit stir two competing cultural visions of Europe and two related competing cultural visions of England (it’s best at this point simply to speak of England, for Brexit is above anything else a crisis within the soul of England, not that of Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland).

Those who argue over ‘Europe’ are tussling over what could be summed up as a ‘Good Europe’ and a ‘Bad Europe’, loose but meaningful collections of images and moral-ethical-aesthetic positions.

To those who love it, ‘Good Europe’ means: a social democratic model that mixes respect for the market with high levels of welfare; progressive taxation; trams and trains; a cosmopolitanism of the mind; cafes; a high regard for elite culture; a love of the new and the futuristic; relationships between people of different countries; a suspicion of certain aspects of the United States; holidays by the sea; (and to get a little more fanciful) Modernist architecture; sex; olive trees; and clean clear signage in Helvetica font.

To those who hate it, ‘Bad Europe’ means: a threat to a prized and superior local historical identity; supranational bossiness; people telling you what to do (in the workplace, in relationships or at the level of the state); dull bureaucracy; French arrogance; German arrogance; continentals who make one feel uncouth and boorish; fancy food that humiliates; immigrants who look odd and speak strangely and are bad neighbours; litter; graffiti; ugly enormous cities full of vagrants and beggars; unsupervised chaos; annoying sexy carefree people; the future; puzzlingly different languages.

But these two coagulations of stereotypes only have an emotional pull because they are the shadows of two competing visions of England. When people squabble over ‘Europe’ in the UK, what they are really arguing about is what sort of country they should be living in.

Those who love ‘Europe’ do so essentially because they are in flight from the spectre of a ‘Bad England’. ‘Bad England’ looks a bit like this: parochial rural life; village fetes; ruddy-faced men who wear purple or red trousers; advocates of hunting and shooting; public schools; dumb aristocrats; boarding schools; shepherd’s pie (and all it stands for); rainy holidays; apple crumble; greyness; people who hate the future and technology; a lack of sex and glamour; a lack of social ease and sophistication; port wine; Sunday evenings in damp February; joylessness; Stilton.

Conversely, those who hate ‘Europe’ do so because they feel they are fighting for a ‘Good England’. ‘Good England’ looks a bit like this: the way things always used to be; modesty; fitting in; doing it your own way; who we were in the Second World War; apple crumble; a bit of rain; test cricket on TV; restrained dignity around emotions; knowing how to take a joke; good chaps; not whingeing; wellies; going for a walk; an extra jumper indoors in winter; standing up for yourself; pale legs; unshowy sex; not bothering too much about one’s hair or clothes; Stilton.

These categorisations sound, of course, a little daft. That doesn’t mean to say they aren’t in some way very real inside every British person who finds themselves feeling very intensely about Brexit.

When one goes beneath the surface politics and economics and asks why someone dislikes or admires ‘Europe’, there will always be a catalytic personal story of some kind, either caused by images of Europe or to which images of Europe are invoked as a solution. ‘Good Europe’ might be a defence against a bullying father; a childhood in a town one hated; a lack of sex in adolescence; people one hated at school … ‘Bad Europe’ might have begun with one’s father’s unemployment; a sense of humiliation on a trip abroad; a feeling of being disrespected by elites; an impression of sexual discomfort.

Knowing there are personal fears and aspirations beneath the debates won’t neutralise the passion on either side, but it will make for more interesting and authentic conversations. We may start to understand and even sympathise with those who had merely been the enemy. To learn to live with one another once more, the British need to ask odd-sounding questions around the kitchen table: ‘How has Europe scared you?’ ‘How has England traumatised you?’ ‘To what problem is your imaginary Europe or England the solution?’

We need to stop speaking about the debate on Europe as if it’s simply about economics and politics. It’s about values and the symbols that carry them: it’s about Stilton vs Brie; about pubs vs cafes; about cars vs trams. It’s about what we’re scared of and what can comfort us. We aren’t wrong to be so exercised about ‘Europe’. We’re wrong to keep discussing the debate in the sober impersonal terms we currently employ.

MA VLAST



Sarah Perry





SARAH PERRY is the author of The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood. She has written for numerous publications including the Guardian, the Observer and the Financial Times, and her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and on RTE1. She has been writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library and the UNESCO Prague City of Literature writer-in-residence. She lives in Norwich, and is a European.



I’m something of a thief, I’m afraid, and among my stolen possessions I have the score to ‘Vltava’, the river theme from the Czech composer Smetana’s symphonic poem Ma Vlast (it means: ‘my country’). This I took from school, having played the piano part in the orchestra – nobody, it seemed to me, could possibly love it as I loved it, or play it as I played it; therefore in spirit if not in law it belonged to me.

The Vltava, I knew, is the river that runs through Prague. But I’d never been deeper into Europe, or for any greater length, than a school day-trip to Calais; so Prague was little more to me than a romantic abstraction in which dark-haired women drank coffee from thimble-sized cups at tables where smoke rose from green glass ashtrays, bickering elegantly over politics and men. I recall practising on the piano in the dining room at home, drifting on its minor triplets: it was the current on which I floated out of the Essex town where I was born, across the muddy Channel, into some network of rivers which in due course would wash me up on the banks of the Vltava itself.

Rivers in particular seemed to me an impossibly romantic feature of mainland Europe: my geography was (and remains) inaccurate to the point of idiocy, but I knew how the Danube, for example, began in Germany, and washed through ten countries before emptying itself into Russia’s Black Sea. The Severn’s modest journey from Wales to Gloucestershire seemed inconsequential in comparison: in Europe, where country abutted country like the pieces of a puzzle, one body of water took in a dozen ways of speaking, a dozen means of baking bread; many hundred ways of telling tales to frighten children when the nights drew in, and of singing in a harvest.

My conception of Europe then was hazy, informed on the one hand by the completion of E111 forms before I took the ferry to Calais, and on the other by the mistrust and contempt with which it was met in the deeply conservative chapel where my family worshipped. I knew that were I to break my leg in the supermarché where I exchanged francs for Brie, I would not have to pay to have it set; this seemed to me a sensible arrangement, and an improvement on Harfleur, Passchendaele and Dunkirk. All the same, I was faintly aware the EU was regarded in certain quarters as an invading force massed fifty yards south-east of Dover’s white cliffs, its fleet packed to the gunnels with straight bananas, legislation regarding the proper refrigeration of the annual chapel tea and machinery with which to dismantle Parliament. From the Ebenezer pulpit preachers preached, with scripture texts appended, that the EU – in common with the Roman Catholic Church – was foretold in the book of Revelation. The Whore of Babylon was mentioned, though it was never clear whether she was a greater or lesser threat to English sovereignty than a banana more linear than creation intended.

But I was European – we all were – this much I knew. The Christmas tree pulled down the attic hatch each year was European; the dusty sweet slices of stollen we ate were European; ‘Silent Night’ was European. Romeo and Juliet were European. So was my father’s car. Parliament occasionally lapsed into Norman French; the Essex soil with its crop of sugar beet was sowed with Roman coin. Italy, France, Germany, Spain: I felt a kinship with them which was nothing like the awed and alienated sensation I felt when reading Arundhati Roy, or buying blue plaster scarabs from the British Museum shop.

In 2016 I saw the Vltava for the first time. It was January, and I’d pitched up in Prague for two months on a UNESCO City of Literature residency. My flat overlooked the river through one broad window with a narrow ledge, and here I leaned out into air which was cold in a sweet, sharp way, nothing like the wet chill of an East Anglian winter, watching swans fly downriver through a snowfall. I propped my laptop on the ledge and sent Smetana tinnily out into the city, tapping out the melody with my right hand.

The love I have for Prague is as unearned as it was immediate. I’ve no right to it: no family connection, no facility with the Czech language or any other, no understanding beyond the cursory of the history of its changing borders; but the kinship I felt when I flatly refused to return that piano score was there from the moment I first walked over Charles Bridge. The stone apostles, the jackdaws, the violinist with his case open for coins; the beggar who corrected my pronunciation of Jak se máš (‘Good morning’) and let me give a biscuit to the dog wrapped in his coat; Master Jan Hus’s statue in the Old Town Square, and the good black coffee served with cakes very nearly like those I baked at home, but also nothing like at all: these seemed, in some obscure indefensible way, to belong to me. In cafes I drank coffee from cups small as thimbles; tapped my cigarette into green glass ashtrays; bickered, as elegantly as I could, about politics and men. I wondered if the teenage thief at the piano had known I would one day come. It did not seem impossible: this was ma vlast.

Now I am forced out of my hazy, romantic European identity – of that abstract sense of fraternity I never needed to explain or to defend. My conversation turns like gossip to the Single Market, Freedom of Movement, the European Court of Human Rights; I fret about the UK border with Ireland, the Erasmus programme, the Customs Union. But when I think of the night of 23 June 2016, and of what has come after – when I threaten, only half in jest, that on my deathbed I’ll recite the name of every family member who voted to take my citizenship from me – it is never in terms of legislation, or of white papers put before Parliament. I think instead of a river that runs from where I stand to the Vltava being dammed up with fistfuls of British soil and scraps of whatever comes to hand; and they’re nothing, these fragments – you couldn’t build a hut on their foundations – and singly they amount to nothing, but taken together they’ll leave me on dry land.

This is a little foolish, of course. The jackdaws, the Vltava, Master Jan Hus: when flights depart Stansted they will be waiting, as they always were. But something has altered. They wait politely now, with good manners, as one waits for a house guest whose stay will be mercifully brief – not with that easeful, familiar welcome reserved for family. The Czech for ‘their country’ is jejich vlast. I cannot pronounce it.

THE TWO STEPHANES



Matt Haig





MATT HAIG is the number one bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive and. . .