Express & Star

Peter Rhodes: Searchin' in the sun

MEMORIES of a great singer, an explosive education and the forced march that took us into Europe

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Unforgettable - Glen Campbell

A PHOTO of Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson unveiling new pre-fab classrooms at a school in Wednesbury sparked a few memories. Britain's current explosion in pupil numbers is not the first. We babyboomers put huge strain on schools which is why so many of us were educated in portable buildings. Ours were heated by huge gas stoves. We quickly discovered that a match, wrapped in silver foil and placed on the heater, would detonate with a loud bang and puff of smoke half-way through the lesson. We made our own entertainment in those days.

I FEAR that if today's kids started letting off match-bombs in class, someone would call bomb disposal and the ringleaders would be sent off for re-education. Everybody takes everything so seriously these days. In the Sixties minor gunpowder plots were dealt with by the flying blackboard eraser.

NEWS of Glen Campbell's death took me back all those years to my first days as a trainee reporter on a weekly newspaper. Lunch lasted an hour, usually at the nearest pub. It had a juke box and the record that always seemed to be playing in the summer of '69 was The Wichita Lineman. So that's two cheese cobs, a pint of bitter and Glen Campbell searchin' in the sun for another overload. Nothing triggers memories quite like music.

"CAN'T live without EU" is one of the slogans to be brandished on October 1 as a mass march, organised by the Stop Brexit campaign, is staged outside the Conservative Conference in Manchester. In a perfect world, a counter-demonstration would brandish the slogan: "Yes, EU can and EU will and everything will be fine."

WHAT astonishes me about the Remoaners is their fervent belief that Britain being in the EU is in any way a normal, natural, beneficial, progressive, logical or democratic state of affairs. It is none of these things. The process of getting to where we were, pre-referendum, has been a shambles, a stumbling 40-year forced march, via Maastricht and Lisbon, along a road of deception, bullying, bamboozling and outright lies. The only well-considered decision in the whole sorry trek was Britain refusing to join the euro. This is why we still have our own currency, and the person we have to thank for that is Gordon Brown. He got a few things right.

REMOANERS should look around the world. Most big and influential nations like ours are not padlocked into unions with 20-odd smaller states. They are independent, sovereign nations and would not have it any other way. Britain used to be like that. In 1973 we warily agreed to remain in a Common Market of six democratic, prosperous western European nations for our mutual benefit. If we had been shown the ultimate plan, an anti-democratic political union of 28 states, effectively transferring our borders to Russia and the Middle East, with "free movement" of entire populations, we'd have run a mile. We should never have got to where we are now. The referendum simply gave us a chance to normalise things. Is it any wonder we took it?

SARAJEVO, Culloden, Yorktown, Caen, Guam. Funny how history so often happens in places we've never heard of.