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Some years ago I was offered a carrier bag emblazoned with the device of UKIP. This took place at the premier temple to English eccentricity, the Great Dorset Steam Fair. I rejected the gift. I had no intention of advertising allegiance to a party and a set of ideas I despise, however lighthearted the occasion. I was rude to the donor; much ruder than I should have been and so rude that I startled my son who is unused to such language from his father. Roll forward to today. UKIP is accorded the dignity of a televised debate with the Deputy Prime Minister. Its leader, self-styled as the People's Leader Against the Establishment, appears impervious to every well-reasoned charge of hypocrisy and scant regard for fact. Many people apparently believe it sensible to send representatives to an organisation which they see as a powerful influence on their lives, when those very representatives oppose everything the organisation stands for and are committed to its demise. Would they apply the same logic to an election to our own Parliament? Everywhere, bitter nationalisms are on the rise, propelled by a sense of injustice that we are all having to pay back debts incurred on our behalf by politicians we elected years ago. Would that any politician could bring himself to say "Governments can only spend your money. There is no other. When we go into debt, you have to pay the money back. It is inevitable that you will be poorer than once you were when we deluded you into living above your means and unavoidable that the poor will feel the pinch more acutely than the rich." It is a dangerous moment for democracy and good sense. In Europe's bosom I am writing this on a terrace overlooking the sea in Ravello, on the Amalfi Coast near Naples. The sea is a thousand feet below. Past visitors to this little town have included Wagner, Steinbeck, Garbo, the Bloomsbury set, the Kennedy's. In the last few days I have been over the mountains to Herculaneum and Pompeii. The guidebook to Pompeii begins with the words: 'The name of Pompeii means something to every educated European citizen'. Indeed it does. As the ghost of a community it is difficult to read. Too much of the contents of the homes and shops and public buildings has been taken away to the safety and anonymity of museums for this vast field of broken walls to feel any longer like a place of habitation for people exactly like ourselves. But to anyone who feels like a 'European citizen' or, like the visiting writers and musicians and artists a world citizen anchored in the culture of Europe,

Pompeii carries a potent message of civic organisation and community. At every crossroads there are stepping stones across the roadway at the level of the pavement. The width of the roads is identical everywhere. The gaps between the three stepping stones at each junction are similarly, identical. It follows that the width between the wheels of the carts that wore grooves in the roadbed must also have been standard, as must the diameter of the wheels to allow the axles to clear the stepping stones. On every street there are faucets and troughs for water. Every year, Pompeii's free inhabitants elected two 'duumvirs', who were the city's leaders for one year. In every public building there is a tablet commemorating the duumvirate under whose auspices and sponsorship it was erected. There are playing fields for the vigorous young; snack bars where business people grabbed their bite of lunch; hotels and pubs; lavish public baths for cleanliness and leisure and gossip. It is not hard to imagine that life was lived in Pompeii two thousand years ago much as it is lived in Ravello today - or in London, or Manchester, or Edinburgh, or Cardiff, or Belfast. Compare and contrast Different cultures organise themselves differently, despite the fact that, in my experience, people differ only slightly across this wide world of ours. In Arab countries you will find a cityscape made up from walled enclosures, each containing its version of the earthly paradise as a home for an extended family. The city comprises a series of separate and intensely private spaces. Between the enclosures you will often find every kind of detritus. It seems as though the inhabitants of each private haven are blind to the public squalor beyond their walls. Notions of citizenship are built on loyalties to family and clan, rather than to a broader community of many families living together in one place and owing obligations to one another to plan and act for mutual convenience and harmony. Such is the European version of community and citizenship. To arrive in Herculaneum is to compare ancient and modern. The approach is through one of Naples' meaner suburbs. Flats and houses in various states of repair and disfigured with graffiti jostle among disused market gardens, the tattered covering of polytunnels flapping depressingly in the breeze. The street plan is as chaotic as the traffic. Entering the site of the

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frontline

June 2014 No.77

Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive

Dylan Thomas, for me, provides a metaphor for wider cultural issues that trouble me.

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ancient city you stand on cliffs 100 feet above the Roman streets, realising only later that you are standing on the surface of the petrified mud that engulfed Herculaneum when Vesuvius exploded in 79 AD. The first inkling that Herculaneum still stood beneath its carapace came 200 years ago when one of the villagers above dug a well. He was followed by military engineers who explored the city by sinking shafts and digging tunnels between them to extract the treasures left behind. Even now, only a fraction of the city is exposed, the millions of tons of spoil removed, with the rest of Herculaneum probably fated to remain beneath today's less salubrious town forever. To walk through Herculaneum's streets is to empathise much more vividly with its citizens than is possible in Pompeii. The wall paintings and mosaics are still in place. Some houses still stand to their full height. The seating around the changing rooms in the public baths is undamaged, each place with its shelf above for discarded clothes. Wooden beams, window frames, shutters, racks for wine and water jars, screens and furniture are still in place; charred by the intense heat of the gases which killed the people. In the boathouses by the ancient shoreline, the remains of 300 of those people still lie where they died, trying to escape the heat by taking to the water. And in Herculaneum the same sense of civic design and order reigns as in its larger neighbour. Streets are well-paved and regularly planned. There is clean water accessible for all. There are public buildings of some splendour, for common use and enjoyment. The implications are clear. Civilisation is both synthetic and fragile. Much of what made Pompeii and Herculaneum decent places to live has been lost to modern Ercolano. Fresh water and efficient sewers have endured as the necessities for public health, but the pleasantries of life have disappeared with the civic pride and sense of accepted order which sustained them. Unconscious unity This year is not only the centenary of the beginning of the disastrous First World War, but also that of the birth of Dylan Thomas. It seems extraordinary that this should be so. Thomas is the creator of the radio drama Under Milk Wood, his inspired narrator for the first broadcast in 1962, Richard Burton. The last half-dozen poems of Dylan Thomas, based as they were on layers of earlier versions, are inspired; works of a genius that could only have flourished further had its possessor not been ambushed by booze and fags and the exhaustion of fame. These poems are allusive, complex, yet entirely comprehensible in their riot of words: in a word, modern. Thomas, for me, provides a metaphor for the wider cultural issues which trouble me. He was Welsh, born in non-Welsh speaking Wales but of parents who were raised in the Welsh language. Nevertheless, Dylan scorned Wales and his own Welshness on many occasions and could not wait to leave his home in Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, for London. Yet every syllable and line and verse of Dylan

Thomas's poetry carries the rhythms and sounds of the Welsh language, the inheritances from the Mabinogion, Taliesin and Dafydd ap Gryffyd plain. Like every other artist and writer, he absorbed every influence from his predecessors that came his way, notably from the French poets of the early 20th century and particularly Arthur Rimbaud. He was perhaps most nearly 'at home' in the little Welsh town of Laugharne, yet his places of action were London and New York. Like his friend and evil genius Augustus John, Dylan Thomas lived the life of the 19th century bohemian, yet he died in the 1950s and might have survived until the present century had he treated himself more kindly. He is a puzzle in space and time and culture, yet his art is deeply and unmistakeably rooted in the past two millennia of European culture and literature. So, I believe, is the way that all of us in Britain live now. If Scotland decides this Autumn to secede from the United Kingdom, it has made its intention clear that it will remain in the European Union. Indeed, the links between Scotland and France, in particular, have always been less conflicted and closer than those between England and France. The literature and music of Ireland and Wales are intrinsic to the arts of Britain, not just today but for many often-troubled centuries past. If the United Kingdom broke up completely or became a loose confederation where would Northern Ireland stand; where Wales? And where does UKIP's dream of an England severed from Europe but presumably on speaking terms with it stand, when Scotland and perhaps the other 'Celtic' nations have their own, broader, visions of a future in which our shared European inheritance is more fully realised? Demagoguery is dangerous. Empty rhetoric and casual versions of the truth are dangerous. Mr Farage is not a joke; he is a threat to all our wellbeing, our sense of ease with one another and the prosperity of our future. He is not alone in Europe. Equally dangerous nationalisms are rife elsewhere across the continent, including here in Italy. But we should heed our European hearts and the lesson of 1930s Germany: plausible arguments which we know to be wrong should be confronted, not indulged under the illusion that they can be controlled. © 2014 David Sherlock info@beyondstandards.net