Theme Park

This week, my wife and I had a brilliant day out in Canterbury. I wanted to go to the cathedral, by way of research. I’d written a short story set in the cathedral, but then realized that I couldn’t remember it fully. There was a distance of about five years between my first visit there and my writing the short story.
I didn’t get a proper birthday. I was working on the day itself, and by the weekend, my wife and I were rowing. We’re still both reeling from that row, if we’re honest. I thought that a day out of London would do us good. I wasn’t expecting my wife to go for it, but she must have been thinking along the same lines. Anyway, hers is our next day out. It will probably mean going to see the new Great Gatsby film, God help me.
Canterbury has got history everywhere. Roman walls, an Augustinian abbey, the ruins of a Norman castle. Tudor buildings, Victorian, Georgian. Even the walk to the town centre from Canterbury East station takes you past turrets and a burial mound. Yet it’s also a modern, thriving city, with great shops, theatres, etc. And the people are friendly. This is city life at its best.
When we got back to London, we felt like we’d arrived in hell. It was weird- we’d only been away for one day. But we got to see our city the way people from the rest of the country do: claustrophobic, dirty and hostile. And we realized what we actually put up with day after day.
I’d like to put my two penn’orth in about the immigration debate. On the whole, I think that people should be allowed to live where they like, and that immigrants and their children can enrich a country. My wife’s parents were both immigrants. We never simultaneously complain about Britons emigrating. We might not like our loved ones going away to live in Spain, Australia, etc; but we accept the idea of people seeking better opportunities where and when they can.
I could no more vote for UKIP than I could the Conservative Party. However…Both those parties play on fears about immigration, fears which have some basis in truth. All the major parties do, to win votes.
UKIP say that Britain is full. Britain isn’t full, but London is. And London is where the jobs are. Does any other country on the planet have this problem? That the wealth of the country is invested in one city. That, economically speaking, the rest of the country might as well not exist? Because an immigrant landing on these shores is not, if he or she has any sense, going to make for Tobermory.
My solution would be to rebuild the country. So that there are jobs in Liverpool, Manchester, Cardiff, Edinburgh. And by jobs, I mean decent-paying and secure ones. In a recent scaremongering news item on the telly, the cameras panned to a caravan on a strawberry field, obviously where illegal immigrants had taken away jobs from UK citizens. So that is really what we’re squabbling about. Strawberry picking. Winkle-picking, for callous bastards who won’t tell you when the tide’s coming in. Or, if you’re lucky, a shift at Starbucks. Is that what you want for your children?
I suspect what the Conservatives have got in mind, anyway, is to ship off anybody below a certain income bracket. So that Britain becomes a larger version of Jersey. A nation-sized theme park where only a few stockbrokers can afford to actually live.