Last time yours truly passed through Munich – yes, this week’s tortuous sentences are served from Bavaria – our continent was at war.
No, I am not that old (the photo on your right gives a reasonably reliable account of my wrinkles).
The Cold War, silly. Or the silly Cold War, if you prefer.
And at the height of its silliness, summer 1980 – Olympic boycotts and all – when the Freeman clan launched their first invasion of the greater European land mass, spending the better part of a month advancing by road to the Tyrol.
This trip set in stone an abiding love of Europe, both the place and the political idea. The whole jaunt, to a kid hitherto exclusive to these isles, felt like discovering a whole new barmy family of which one had hitherto been unaware.
All this history, these cultures so similar to our own yet intriguingly alien, part of a mad but optimistic collective endeavour with which we had recently hitched our lot.
But if the past is a foreign country, it is fair to say the Europe I first explored 34 years ago is in many ways a foreign continent.
The hasty admittance of ex-Soviet Bloc and other Eastern nations sealed the fate of that more social Common Market of yore.
Although clearly a fine long term goal – after due periods of support aimed at bringing their economies up to speed – this was instead rushed through, malice aforethought, part post Cold War provocation, part neo-liberal sabotage.
An irony, but the inevitable Western exodus of labour from these impoverished states was, for me, one of Margaret Thatcher’s main legacies. Ironic, given her holy status with Britain’s most strident modern nationalists, I mean.
That she was a driving force, with Conservatives continent-wide, behind acts of Euro Parliament which ‘swamped’ the UK, as she herself might put it, is something they’d likely sooner you forgot.
Working people played second fiddle to her key aims of driving down wages and crippling the EEC’s social policies – notably welfare – by simply rendering them financially unsustainable.
That she won is apparent. That her current worshippers recognise and strive to capitalise on the awful damage she did, yet dare not apportion blame, is telling.
At which point I take my leave. A new Cold War looms and, München as I’m glad to be back, there’s no place like home.