How it starts

Years ago, I watched a Chieftain Tank ploughing its way through a birch wood somewhere in North Germany.

Its 62 ton bulk, coupled with its 750 bhp Leyland powerpack made insultingly small work of the trees and surrounding undergrowth, knocking them over and piling them up in front until they had become a ten foot high timber heap, at which point the tank just clambered over them to start the whole process again.

Substitute ‘Tom’ for ‘Chieftain’ and ‘words’ for ‘birch trees’, and you have some idea of how my eldest son conducts a conversation abroad. Any language of which he has the faintest grasp is deployed in the cause, as he valiantly beats syntax and grammar into a pulp, pushes it in front of him and then climbs over it the better to make his point. It is brave, inspiring stuff, and he always gets a good reaction.

His enthusiasm is matched by his younger brother’s reticence, the latter preferring to let others do the talking while he listens, smiles politely and laughs when it is right to do so.

However, Al is our official German speaker, or at least he was when he did his GCSE exchange with Warendorf Gymnasium back in the day, and his knowledge was therefore called upon in a little coffee bar in Northern Italy last week when a neighbouring table of Germans overheard us talking English and asked rather pointedly about Brexit.

We made the point that everyone apart from a few pampered BBC executives seems to try to make, that 95% of us are still the calm, moderate, pragmatic and hopeful people we always were, and that we trusted that they would continue to come and visit once it was all over. If it was ever over. We expressed a hope that they would judge us beyond the white noise of our political discourse, just as we would expect to do when others had their occasional convulsions.

‘We are Germans,’ said the imposing woman who seemed to be in charge. ‘And we are right’.

It all seemed a little bit on the assertive side, but we let it pass. Outside in the street, a young girl walked past with a large white lop-eared rabbit on a lead, so it was clearly that sort of day.

‘Angela Merkel,’ said Caroline. ‘Good woman’

‘Nein,’ said our friend. ‘Angela Merkel is the devil’

It turned out that when they said ‘right’, they meant ‘far right’ or even ‘unfeasibly extreme right’.

‘So you are AFD?’ I asked

‘Just about,’ she said, with the air of someone who felt that Germany’s principle far right party was disappointingly moderate for her tastes.

After a while, her husband, who had little English but whose attitudes made his wife look like a Liberal Democrat, came over and sat uninvited at the head of our table.

‘Merkel, he said to our German speaker, ‘is a Bilderberg conspirator. She is part of a big plot to remove our freedoms.’

‘Rothschild,’ he continued looking around to make sure he was not overheard, ‘and other people like that; they will have all the money and will control our lives. Merkel is their servant. If people like you and me argue, if we get in their way….’. He pulled out an imaginary pistol and shot me between the eyes, with slightly more enthusiasm than I would have ideally wanted.

It all seemed a bit surreal, in a lovely bar in an Italian wine village, drinking our café freddo, but it was real enough to us.

Al, for whom the words ‘liberal’, ‘tolerant’ and ‘open-minded’ might have been specifically coined, was torn between the Anglo-Saxon ideal of not making a scene, and the basic human one of telling the guy that he was a twat. Disappointingly, Anglo- Saxon man won. After all, there was wine to be drunk, and we were on holiday.

Of course, there is a ‘so what’ to all this, but I figure that it’s too obvious to lay down. Only it suddenly seems like a really good time NOT to be giving up on politics entirely, just because our own version of it is a bit of a cake and arse show.