I climbed to the mountain top where Italy meets with Slovenia and Austria – the converging point of the Slav, Germanic and Latin cultures.
20 years ago, the place was demarcated with barbed wire. On the Slovenian (then Yugoslav) side, civilians could not approach. It was a military area.
Now, with the European Union, the frontiers are non-existent. A plaque celebrates peace and harmony between nations.
The plaque quotes Indian spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy, who campaigned for tolerance and brotherhood among nations until his death in 2007.
Curious that at this point where hostile European nations finally found themselves in peace, no suitable European can be found to quote on a plaque. In the new Europe, it is safer to look to an Indian to express the right idea.
“Sovereignty of the Free Territory belongs to the people living in that territory.” Anodyne words these may seem, but they are loaded. The corollary is that sovereignty does NOT belong to those not living there … not any more.
The inscription is on a memorial in a fishing village on Slovenia’s Adriatic coast. The village looks Italian: it has a clock tower like St Mark’s in Venice. It WAS in fact earlier Italian. At the end of World War II Tito’s Yugoslav Partisans seized it together with the city of Trieste.
In 1954, an international treaty gave Trieste to Italy and the rest of the coast to the Yugoslavs. The same evening as the treaty was signed, the Italians from the settlements along the coast left their homes, abandoning pots cooking on stoves, and walked over to Italy as refugees.
They were scared for their lives, and for good reason. The Partisans had slaughtered thousand of Italians on the coast in 1945 before U.N. authority was established. It was a reprisal for the cruel, racist occupation of parts of Slovenia and Croatia during WWII, when Italian Fascists burned villages, shot hostages and sent thousands of young men to concentration camps where they starved and died. The Italians were afraid that withdrawal of the U.N. would lead to another bloodbath.
After 1954, tension continued to run high along a border of barbed wire and armed guards. Trieste was packed with thousands of resentful Italian emigrants. The Yugoslavs bristled with Communist militancy.
By 2004, Slovenia and Italy were both in the European Union. The concept of government by nation states had reached its limits of absurdity. Many inhabitants in the area had had 5 sets of different state identity papers without ever moving from the house where they were born. And still no real peace.
Now that both Slovenia and Italy are in the EU, people can move freely from one country to another to work, they use the same currency (the euro), and they drive through the old frontier without having to stop (Schengen).
Harmonious co-existence has broken out. A supranational organisation such as the EU may have its drawbacks, but many in the West do not give it the full credit for creating peace where before there was killing and hatred.
My father, 94, muses by the Cherwell river about the nature of courage. As a very civilian teacher, he was not pre-ordained to deal with such matters. He did not want to join the British Army. He had to. He was called up in World War II and sent to fight the Japanese in the jungles of Burma. Today’s lessons:
- The first time I came into physical danger, I had to pull myself together with a great effort. After that, it comes more easily. You are scared, but everybody else is too, so you are all in it together.
- My moment of weakness was when I was seized with panic about going into holes in the ground.
- I made up for this by bravely crawling out under fire to cut the telephone wires of Japanese attacking British headquarters.
- I thought my last moments had come when I was sent in an elderly plane to reconnoitre Japanese positions in caves overlooking a valley. The pilot was pissing himself with fear. I could hear bullets cracking past and thought sooner or later one would hit me. I returned safely, and the next day the commanding British general ordered a napalm attack and roasted the Japnese alive in their caves. I wish it did not have to be like that.
- The African troops I commanded relished hand-to-hand combat. The Japanese were scared stiff of them. But the Africans themselves were afraid of mortars raining down from the sky. On several occasions, I found myself alone in the line. They had run away.
- What do I make of all this? War is wrong. Never again.
My father never thought his exploits in Burma worthwhile. As a post-war intelligence officer, he questioned Burmese political leaders about their aspirations for the future. He received one surly answer: you British must go.
My father did his bit. He did not choose to make war. But when he had to, he stood up and met the challenge. He discouraged me as a little boy from considering him as a hero. For Britain to make war in a place like Burma served little useful purpose. It did not add up.
Is Afghanistan much different?
Today the removers come to take away my parents’ belongings. They are in a nursing home, very elderly, unable to look after themselves. Next week, the builders move in to renovate their home. Then I move in.
A change of generations such as this take place countless times all over the world. But it is no less wrenching for being common. For weeks, I have been casting my eyes over letters, photos, family documents … and more letters, more photos. A whole family life which no longer has relevance for the people who collected it.
I drag out endless boxes, one more dusty and cobwebbed than the other. The removers seize everything they can lay hands on and stuff it into boxes, methodical like locusts. Two lives are being torn apart as the day wears on. What to keep, what to throw away? In what way are past generations’ lives relevant to mine?
I feel my parents’ presence seeping away. At the end of the afternoon, the rooms are bare and silent. I tell my father when I visit him in the evening, and he barely comments. He has other concerns on his mind. One of his favourite carers (female) has gone on holiday for three weeks, and he is a bit sad.
I return to his old home with my wife. The moment of transition has occurred. A generation has changed.
I feel as I were there (except I wasn’t). I remember where I was when the television showed the blurred pictures of the American astronauts stepping down on to the Moon. I was a young Reuters correspondent in Paris, manning the office late in the evening and wondering why I was not on the big story.
I was young, the world was changing, I was growing up fast, and landing on the Moon was one of those exciting things which kept on occurring. After the Moon, no doubt something else.
Now 40 years have passed, and nobody has traveled to the Moon for a long time. It fascinates nobody, is on nobody’s radar screen. Watching the television pictures of the landing is just one of those many things I did long ago. Some great, others mediocre and the odd thing I feel slightly ashamed of.
Landing on the Moon even begins to sound like one of those old war stories – no doubt hairy for those involved, but of concern to us today? Not much.
Anybody out there feel thrilled by all this?
Authorites talk to us in emotional terms about swine ‘flu: take it seriously but don’t panic. OK got that, but how about some more practical information so we can take our own initiatives effectively?
- Everybody knows one should not cough and sneeze over others. But stop shaking hands, stand apart from each other, keep washing your hands: this is what would really change behaviours. How about an imaginative PR campaign to convince people to change their habits?
- If you think you have swine ‘flu, call your doctor but don’t go to the surgery, they say. But how do you get medicines? Which ones can be bought over the counter? If you need a prescription, how do you get it from your doctor? Do you have to send someone round to fetch it? Does the doctor put it in the mail? If so, what do you do during the 48 hours or so it takes to get your hands on the medicine? Groan?
- If you catch swine ‘flu now, how much immunity do you have and how long does it last? Doctors merely warn against deliberately trying to catch it. Fair enough. But for those of us who have obligations in the outside world, it would be useful to know to what extent one is protected.
Answers anybody? Give us power to act responsibly.
It’s the 500th anniversary of the Geneva protestant reformer Jean Calvin, so I went to see the virtual exhibition “A Day in the Life of Calvin.”
Calvin pioneered freedom of speech, self-determination of peoples and individual responsibility – he installed clocks in public places and insisted citizens were punctual.
But the speeches and sermons which the exhibition cleverly presents are heavy going: rasping admonitions and complaints about his fellow human beings.
I finally got his idea of “predestination.” We are all sinners in the eye of God. But God’s grace saves some from perdition. ONLY God’s grace. It does not matter whether you are more virtuous than others.
This was a nice justification for his own autocratic powers. It certainly discouraged democratic questioning. His successors quietly dropped the idea not long after his death.
As everybody knows, apricots are ripe and it’s time to drop everything and swing into jam production. The goal: golden sunshine from a pot the whole year round.
I am on the Slovenian Adriatic coast, so the recipe of my wife’s aunt from Maribor is the one to use. My wife is project leader, sugarer and stirrer. I am cutter, rum-spreader and screwer.
The Maribor aunt sets a punishing regime. First find apricots which are just ripe. Ours are from the local market and are grown five kilometres down the coast. I know the spot.
Then wash, stone and cut vast numbers into just the right size of pieces for later spreading. Weigh them carefully to judge the sugar amount, add a dose of pectin, cook for ages, test the runniness to take off the stove just in time, wash the jars, sterilise them in the oven, fill them, wipe the rims, sterilise the screw caps with rum, and screw them on. Put the jars upside down in the oven for 10 minutes to complete the hermetic sealing. And wipe the sweat from the your brow.
Skip any of these steps and you risk having stringy lumps, juice all over the place and mould under the lids. Not even worth passing off to friends.
As it is, we have pots of pristine jam stretching as far as the eye can see. 10 hours work, in three shifts. Apricots are demanding task-masters.
On the internet, everbody is talking about who twitters and tweets the most. I can tell you: it’s the crazy swallows around the Slovenian Adriatic village of Izola.
Morning and evening, they swoop at phemonenal speeds among the rooftops. They fly in gangs of a dozen. And they tweet. In full throat, excitedly, loudly and non-stop for a couple of hours or so.
Sometimes a group flies straight at me on the balcony, like in one of those war films, then swoops steeply upwards a couple of metres before my face, corkscrews over the rooftops and comes round for another run.
As they approach, the sounds builds up like an approaching plane, hitting me with a huge shrill tweet as they whizz past.
Where do they get the energy to propel their tiny frames? My experience of the animal world suggests such frenetic excitement has to do with food or mating. At such speeds, I don’t see much food getting into their gullets. A few go off in couples, so I guess it is mating. The males chasing the females, showing off and boasting. The females enjoying the chase, and remaining faithful to no one.
Red hot and lusty, they are like teenage motor-cycle gangs. But more stylish and charming. Keep waking me up a 6 a.m. I love your tweeting.
