Sixty years on the Street of Shame

I am now marking 60 years as a working scribe.

I favour the word ‘scribe’ rather than ‘hack’. The latter implies, surely implausibly, that a journalist will do anyone’s bidding for money.

There have been vast changes in the media since my debut in journalism in 1963. With the march of technology, this is only natural – things have changed everywhere else, too.

But what’s striking is the revolution in values. Almost everything once considered acceptable is now the opposite. Being reprimanded by your boss is now called ‘bullying’. If we complained, we were told, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, don’t come into the kitchen.’

There wasn’t such a sense of horror around paedophilia in the old days, deplorable as it is. I was informed, on first coming to Fleet Street, that the proof-readers at the Times were exceptionally meticulous because they were unfrocked clergymen, and much respected for their erudition.

‘Why unfrocked?’ I asked, innocently. ‘Oh, usually for interfering with choirboys,’ came the insouciant reply. Was it a more forgiving age, or a more brutal one?

Things look different when they affect you personally.

Just take the difference between a theoretical idea and the impact of that idea when it impinges on one’s own life.

I followed the Brexit debate attentively. I didn’t vote for Brexit, or against it; but I’m interested in the idea of ‘sovereignty’. I like Charles de Gaulle’s concept of a ‘Europe of nations’.

That means the nation state should affirm its own sovereignty while nonetheless forming friendly cultural and trading associations with neighbours.

I enjoyed the highfalutin discourses of Claire Fox, an energetic Brexiteer in the Lords; and Brexity Kate Hoey, also in the Lords, is surely a spirited Ulster lass. Meanwhile Ruth Deech, an admirable supporter of matrimony in the Lords, had to bear the slings and arrows of her smart Oxford friends when coming out for Brexit. All these strong women of a certain age!

But now we are getting down to brass tacks. And I’m dealing with an issue that involves my own personal life: from theory to practice.

In the first months of this year, I have had the task of transporting the contents of a small flat in Dublin – obviously, within the EU – to Deal in Kent – now, obviously, not.

From November last year, negotiations were under way with an established haulier and removals firm based in Whitstable. Mr Dempsey, an Irishman whose trucks have been wending ’twixt Ireland and England since 1968, agreed to haul my books, clothes, small items of furniture, pictures, bric-à-brac and the rest of the personal clutter I have accumulated.

But then Mr Dempsey began to lose heart, and seemed more reluctant to continue with negotiations. ‘Brexit has made moving the contents of a residence into a nightmare,’ he told me wearily. Everything has to be itemised in documentary septuplets, he sighed: seven copies of each document spelling out just what is being moved.

If any item contains components made outside the EU, that has to be listed in detail. Information about what was bought when and where must be provided. Does that include my Uncle Jim’s sitting-room chair, acquired around 1948, acquired by me around 1998? Yes, said Mr Dempsey. HMRC requires authentication that this personal ‘change of residence’ is not a commercial tax dodge.

Then the veteran haulier threw in the towel. His son lamented, ‘We’ve trucked stuff between Ireland and England all our lives, but Brexit has ruined us. It’s broken the business.’ They cancelled the removals job – more trouble than it’s worth.

And so, as spring beckoned, I opened negotiations with another removals company. They started off by warning me that Brexit had turned a previously simple task of loading a van with household stuff into a bureaucratic ordeal, and to be prepared for the vast amount of paperwork that awaits.

Funny how, when something affects your own life, grandiose theories can be replaced by exasperated experience.

It’s often assumed that England’s hereditary European opponent is France, and the French are frequently blamed for sticky problems with EU relations, or troubled issues such as the illegal Channel crossings.

But, as my late husband would point out, the English language reveals that the Dutch were the true ‘hereditary enemy’ (being sharp competitors in trade).

Slang involving the Dutch often implies deceit. A Dutch treat isn’t actually a treat. A Dutch uncle isn’t really an uncle. In a Dutch auction, the prices go downwards. Lighting one cigarette from the tip of another was called a Dutch f*** – hardly flattering.

Now we are enjoined to open our car doors with the Dutch manoeuvre. Instead of using the hand nearer the car door, you reach over to the door with the other hand. This means the driver will naturally turn his or her head backwards to spot oncoming traffic. A Dutch contortion, maybe?