SURELY it’s important for our spiritual and mental health that we all know where we come from and where we belong.
For most (though not all) people that sense of belonging comes first and foremost from their families.
Then, perhaps, it comes from their home town or village; then maybe from their faith, if they have one; and also perhaps from their skin colour.
Now, I'm not saying that no one should ever move out of his or her immediate locality, social class, ethnic clique or religious comfort zone.
There has to be some degree of inter-mixing and inter-breeding, otherwise the gene pool becomes dominated by thick, murderous types who have three eyes in their foreheads.
Lamentably, to a certain extent, that has already happened in physically isolated areas of our own country such as Norfolk (where the derogatory phrase ‘NFN’ is widely used about dim people, meaning ‘Normal For Norfolk’).
What I will say is that where we can, each of us should strive to stay in our own nation – i.e. where we were born and brought up as youngsters.
Of course, the brigands of the international infotainment industry, who want to turn us all into plastic Americans, are busy all the time undermining this concept of the nation.
Other forms of globalisation also militate against the preservation of national cultures – but the nation remains fundamentally important to human identity and to our sense of belonging.
I am emphatically NOT saying that immigration and emigration are bad things. Almost every nation has received immigrants and benefited from them, economically, culturally and spiritually, and perhaps none more so than our own.
And yet, I have often asked myself: would I personally like to live in any other country but this one?
The answer comes thundering back that I wouldn’t; that I simply couldn’t bear to turn my back on my own country, to abandon it, as do so many Brits do each year by emigrating.
To abandon Britain because you are sick of its frustrations (including the awful weather, the punitive tax system, the abysmal state schooling, the crap-beyond-belief trains and roads etc) is such a defeatist and selfish thing to do.
Such emigration is a quite different thing to the desperate flight of incoming refugees, who want to come here after suffering persecution in their own countries.
In my view, such refugees are more deserving of residency in the UK than, for example, the thousands of moaning minnies and small time villains who each year pack up and move to Spain to live.
Having said all that, I love Spain , and have enjoyed two holidays there earlier this year with my girlfriend, Posh Boots.
On the most recent one, we became fixated by a bar we nicknamed ‘The Monster Bar’ – because it was full of monstrous expatriates from various northern countries of Europe , including our own.
They were very odd people, those 'monsters' from Britain , the Netherlands , Germany and France .
They apparently do nothing all day but drink in karaoke bars and indulge in swingers’ sex.
Their facial features are strange and coarse; bestial even. I like to imagine that they have grown ugly physically as well as spiritually because they have abandoned their own countries for the easy life in the sun.
Except that their life isn’t easy – not when they are away from the cultures that nurtured them and from their remaining family obligations.
The life of the ex-pat is very often an empty, pointless one that corrupts the soul.
Human beings are not meant to live like that. No wonder they’ve grown to look like monsters.
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Lord Vino du Matin wrote...
Don't you be having a go at Norfolk, boy. We know where you live......
Posted by: Lord Vino du Matin | November 7, 2007 3:33 PM