CHEATING FOREIGNERS - PART I

The British, for those who love simplistic generalisations, can be broadly divided into two camps - the pro-Europeans, and the more or less xenophobic. The former can be found sitting outside cafés around Britain in sub-zero temperatures sipping a latte macchiato and moaning about the cold in a forlorn attempt to recreate a recent camping holiday in Riccione, where they sat outside seafront cafés and moaned about the heat.


They use a GB sticker on their car with the European Union stars on it, and enjoy using the Euro as something far simpler than dealing with tens of thousands of lire. They are the kind of people who become Host Families for foreign students (at least until the henpecked husband starts developing a muted but rather obvious crush on the latest Russian madame). The latter, on the other hand, demonstrate a love for tweed and Barbour jackets, shooting things, Land Rovers and an almost erotic relationship with the pound sterling. Both groups are driven largely by emotion rather than reason. I had always considered myself firmly part of the former group, but that was before I took a test to join the European Commission in the early nineties, and subsequently bought myself a Barbour Bedale jacket.

My late father was wrong about some things (notably Terry Wogan's use of hairpieces, the giving back of the Falkland Islands to Argentina, the imminent return to the use of the horse as the world's preferred means of transport, though history may yet bear him out on all three), but he was right about many. "If you want to travel the world," he once advised me, "do it at the Government's expense." He urged me to try for the Diplomatic Service, but I was either hungover, drunk or planning my next poetic binge, and resentfully failed to pay any attention to his conservative, bourgeois opinionating.

His comments were inspired by the fact that he'd spent 12 years during the fifties and early sixties living in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), where he had gone to join the Northern Rhodesia Police as an adventurous 21-year-old. At the time, travel to and from Africa was still common by sea, so he had enjoyed a three-week voyage first-class every eighteen months as he came home on leave and returned to his adopted country.

Apart from regaling us with impossible crocodile stories and tales of witchdoctors and tribal chiefs, he didn't really talk much about his experiences, and somehow never got around to jotting down some memoirs about where he was stationed and when, and other day-to-day details that would make fascinating reading for our potted family history. Only at his funeral did I find out in just what esteem he had been held, when ex-colleagues I'd never even heard of appeared and paid glowing tributes to his memory. I hadn't known, for example, that he'd been singled out to be sent to the volatile region near the border with the Belgian Congo when pro-independence unrest broke out due to his negotiating skills and, not least, the fact that, unlike the vast majority of his colleagues, he'd taken the trouble to learn a local language, Bemba, fluently. He'd also broken with the common practice of promoting only European officers and had prioritised putting African officers in positions of responsibility. But I digress from my original thrust, Foreigners and How They Can't Be Trusted, a premise I shall prove beyond reasonable doubt in Part Two.



PART TWO TO FOLLOW SHORTLY.