Saying goodbye to guests is normally straightforward. Neither genuflection nor a low bow is expected. “How lovely to see you”, a peck on each cheek, a little shepherding to the door, and a spot of car talk typically suffice, though a goodbye wave and an answering toot on the hooter often ice the cake.
Last week I told you that Emma Grant came for tea and stayed for lunch. What I didn’t mention was that she enjoyed herself a lot. So much so that encouraging her to leave proved a challenge. Getting her to stand up was hard and walking her to the front door was harder still. But negotiating the threshold was where the true hurdle lay.
Our food was not to blame. Her superstructure was as before, and her hour-glass stomach, still minute, had not swollen by the seconds. No, it was the wine. She had glugged it down in a way that suggested she preferred its effect over its nose. Faced with the quaffing, Noah the connoisseur was forced to acknowledge that his idol had feet of clay.
Ever the sourpuss, I mused that clay feet are what idols typically have, and they serve the bibulous well when appended to hollow legs. Watching Noah watching Emma who was watching nothing in particular, I found myself saying, silently of course: “Behold – wine prig meets wine pig”. I can be nasty that way.
Plainly she was in no condition to drive. “Call her a taxi!” I cried.
“Don’t you dare, dahling. I am certainly no taxi. Call me a limousine if you must.” Yes, I thought, as in the brandy. But a taxi it was that was called, and, once she had been poured into it, she took a handkerchief out of her bag and waved it daintily at us by way of farewell.
When she had left, I collapsed into an armchair.
“Bloody hell,” I gasped.
“She certainly does know how to have fun,” Noah responded.
I remained silent for a while. Then I said “Can we consider what Emma said when, erm, sober. She said we have no culture to protect, so if we are swamped by immigrants, what does it matter? We lose nothing.”
“Isn’t she right? What common culture do we have? What common culture, at least, do we have that deserves to be protected?” Noah asks.
“Ok, but what about protecting local jobs? Surely a nation has a right to do this,” I say.
“Common culture”
“Only if the jobs are needed to support the common culture,” Noah answers.
“Otherwise, they are interchangeable. Why should a local have a right to a job in preference to, say, a Malawian?”
“Normally you’re a cutie, but now you’re being obtuse. Locals have a stake in the world they live in. How do you lawyers put it. Possession is nine points of the law, so dispossession is nine times disappointing.”
“Nicely put. I see the point you’re making. I don’t concede it, but I see it.”
In Noah’s world, seeing is not necessarily believing. He needs a conceptual seeing-eye dog. “But now to enforcement. Sam Goldwyn is said to have said …”
“I know what he said ….”
“No, you don’t. He is said to have said that a verbal contract is not worth the paper it’s written on, but actually he said something quite different. Google it. I am quoting the received version to make a comparable point. It is that an expectation in the air is not worth the spirit underlying it.”
Vein … underlying … spirit – come, come, Noah, you can do better than this. Instead of saying this, I expatiate.
“The expectation can be made into a law, and then the government will enforce it.”
“What?!” I exclaim.
“What if, as in the present case, the government fails? What if it lets foreigners in willy-nilly, and then, in the face of repeated demands, fails to send them home?”
“Well, then the locals will enforce it.”
Bit apprehensive
“How?!” I exclaim, a bit apprehensive now.
“How? By traditional means – coercion, force and violence. If you doubt me, look around you,” says Noah. I think he is about to come over all Saint-Just. He thinks that a passing knowledge of French wine makes him an expert on the French Revolution.
“But I thought the exercise of force was the prerogative of government.”
“It is, but only derivatively. It is the people in whom power ultimately vests. If the government fails to act, the people will exercise that power. Chaotically, to be sure, but exercise it they will.”
Saint-Just it is, then.
“What if the people fail in the exercise of force you seem so keen on?” I ask Noah.
“Then they will be swamped. The process is eternal down the ages. The sainted Emma justly said as much, and I agree.” Noah didn’t quite say this, but he might as well have done so.
“I mean, Islam swamped half the world in the first millennium, and in the last one, we swamped the rest. American Indians, Aztecs, Incas and the locals generally did their best to resist, but they lost, and were swamped.”
“Ok, I see. Our locals did not and were not, however. They used their power and, in unswamping mood, drove out the ‘illegals’. The government called for calm – it always does – but otherwise looked on quite helpless.”
Sort of so far and much further, I ruminate, but I must stop this sofa-thinking.
“Fair or sensible”
In bed at the end of the day, I say to Noah. “Do you favour what the locals did? It really doesn’t seem either fair or sensible.”
Noah agrees, but then says. “However ghastly the idea is, we cannot run away from it. In the land of ‘chaos and old night’, fairness and good sense have little to say. They are, I am afraid, quite swamped.”
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