Why I'll be Voting LibDem

We need to keep a clear head about this election, and remember why it's been called. There's one reason only: the last Parliament's impasse over Brexit. Like Theresa May before him, Boris Johnson just could not "get Brexit done". The election was his response to that predicament.

Since it was called, the conversation has spiralled out from Brexit. In an election campaign, political parties all set out their stalls. Voters are fair game. Spend, spend, spend is the order of the day. Understandable at this time of year: Black Friday beckons. Whose wares sparkle the brightest, are wrapped the prettiest, seduce us into thinking that they offer what we most want or need?

I want to remind us that Brexit is the reason for this election, and it's Brexit that should be the focus of the debate. That's not to say that the climate emergency, international trade, the economy, health, education, security, transport infrastructure, devolution and much else aren't crucially important to the flourishing of our country. But when we examine those themes and how we want to address them in the immediate future (the next five years), they all converge on the decision this nation must make in the next few weeks or months about its relationship with the European Union. It's not that the short-term urgent must displace the long-term important. But what we do about Brexit will profoundly influence the direction our country takes in the coming decades, and how we engage with all the other crucial priorities we face.

Here in England, only the Greens and the Liberal Democrats are unambiguously campaigning on a pro-EU ticket. The Conservatives want to "get Brexit done". Labour promises a People's Vote on a renegotiated Brexit deal, but Jeremy Corbyn won't himself campaign for Remain or Brexit. We know where the Brexit Party stands. I find much that is highly attractive in the Greens' programme and won't deny that it's tempting to support them. But I've concluded that the Libdems stand the best chance of providing a realistic challenge to the two main parties and adding substantially to the elected members holding the balance of power should we elect another hung Parliament (which may be the best outcome we can hope for in these unpredictable times).

For the avoidance of doubt, I should confess at this point that I'm a paid-up member of the Liberal Democrat Party, and have been since I retired. If you want to, dismiss everything else I write on the grounds that I would say that, wouldn't I? But let me press on and hope you may come with me.

Jo Swinson has had a mixed press since she announced that the heart of the Libdem Manifesto would be a commitment to revoke Brexit. The Sheffield audience at the Leaders' Question Time broadcast was surprisingly hostile - where were Nick Clegg's former supporters from the Sheffield Hallam constituency where we once lived? She is not quite fully formed as a leader. She needs to inhabit the role, discover how to nuance conviction with a realistic assessment of what's achievable and where compromise will be needed. She would do well to cultivate subtlety. And maybe not knock the Labour Party quite so brutally. Politics is the art of the possible. This takes time - a luxury you don't have when you're plunged into the maelstrom of an election campaign. But Jo is bright, energetic, fluent, and completely committed. Despite the reviews, I think she and Nicola Sturgeon can be pleased to have given as good as they got in that unforgiving bear pit of the #BBCQT arena.

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So what about the Liberal Democrat manifesto commitment to "stop Brexit"?

It's been much criticised as going back on the outcome of the 2016 referendum. "How dare you ride roughshod over a democratic decision we made!" "Why can't you get over the fact that you lost!" "How can you be so arrogant as to pretend to know better than the nation as a whole!" We've heard a lot of talk like that. And yes, the Libdem stance could look more than a little cavalier if presented too clumsily. A lot of this is the cut and thrust of electioneering. But underneath it is, I think, a misunderstanding about the intellectual basis of this "stop Brexit" pledge. So it's worth examining this if we are to give Jo Swinson a fair hearing.

There are two objections to it. The first is that as a matter of politics, it's theoretically flawed; the second that as a matter of tactics, it's ill-judged and unlikely to win support. In terms of the audience, I'm not thinking of conviction Brexiters but of people who voted Remain in 2016 and who would be expected to be sympathetic to the Libdems. Clearly, plenty of them believe that the referendum result should be honoured, even if they don't like it. And some have argued that the Libdem platform should have been: vote for us and we'll push for a People's Vote and campaign to Remain in the EU. To them, the absolutism of the "stop Brexit" rhetoric is not calculated to gain friends and allies, and to win over waverers.

First, the theoretical objection. The logic of "stop Brexit" is in fact clearly set out in the manifesto. The election of a Liberal Democrat majority government on a clear stop Brexit platform will provide a democratic mandate to stop this mess, revoke Article 50 and stay in the EU. In other words, if (yes, I know - a big "if") the Libdems were elected, that would be the evidence ipso facto that stopping Brexit was what the nation wanted, for it would have elected the party that had promised to deliver precisely that outcome. That argument is unassailable. Just as it would be if we voted in a Labour government whose manifesto commitment was to nationalise the railways. The executive would go on to do just that because the election had provided the necessary mandate. I applaud a party that's prepared to be unambiguous about its core message. I'm glad to be able to vote for it on the basis of my ex animo belief that any Brexit will disadvantage our nation compared to the benefits we currently enjoy as EU members, and a no-deal Brexit would be nothing short of a catastrophe.

As to the tactical objection, the manifesto addresses that too. In other circumstances, we will continue to fight for a people's vote with the option to stay in the EU, and in that vote we would passionately campaign to keep the UK in the EU. These "other circumstances" are those in which the Libdems don't gain an overall majority. Yes, we know that's going to be the outcome, even if we can expect to see Remainers swing behind the Libdems just as they did in the recent European Parliament and local elections. But political parties always campaign on the basis of the vision that drives their ideals and values. This is what we want to hear and get a feel for: what do you really stand for? It's true, as someone said (was it Abraham Lincoln?) that parties campaign in poetry but have to govern in prose - but poetry is important in the task of winning hearts and minds. I won't say that there aren't risks in the Libdem strategy of going for broke over Brexit. But the sheer chutzpah of championing a single clear message may prove to reap an unexpected harvest.

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I live in a constituency that voted to Remain in the EU. The Libdem constituency party thinks there's a good chance of doing well here. But while I understand the reasons for voting tactically, I find I can’t swallow my principles and vote for a party I don’t believe in.  Our former MP is a Tory who voted Remain, but now believes we must "deliver on the result of the referendum" and has studiously supported the Government in its attempts to do that under both Theresa May and Boris Johnson. It’s high time to challenge that thinking. I too want to "get Brexit done" - consign it to history through the democratic process of a general election, restore the status quo, focus once more on the challenges that face our nation, and, secure in our partnership with the other nations of the EU, respond to the immense global crises that confront the human race and so help create a better future for our world.

I've regularly rehearsed the arguments for EU membership in this blog since before the referendum. Just scroll down and have a look. In this, as in everything else, we are "better together". This election is all about Brexit. Let's talk about it!

In praise of George Eliot on her 200th birthday

This week marks the bicentenary of the birth of one of England's greatest novelists, George Eliot. She was born on 22 November 1819 in Nuneaton, not far from Coventry, the city that was to play an important part in her life and be immortalised in her novel Middlemarch.

Coventry was where I discovered George Eliot. We lived there from 1987 to 1995 when I was Precentor of Coventry Cathedral. In that time I was asked to go to Nuneaton to dedicate a memorial to its greatest daughter. By then I was reading the novels, and someone must have overheard me exclaiming how marvellous they were. And indeed, what prompts this bicentennial blog is precisely the revelation these great books proved to be when I opened them for the first time. I read through all her mature novels in the space of a year and wondered why it had taken me so long to discover them. Or, I think it's as fair to say, to be discovered by them. I'll try to explain.

In 1994 I gave a lecture at Nuneaton's George Eliot Hospital to mark the 175th anniversary of her birth. I posted it last week (on my other website where I post lectures and sermons) as I gave it at the time. The title was "Mary Ann Did Not Go". Mary Ann Evans was of course her real name. And "did not go"? It referred to a diary entry of her father's lamenting her refusal to attend church with him one Sunday morning in 1842. The church in question was St Michael's, Coventry that would later become the Cathedral and be bombed in the Luftwaffe raid of November 1940. You'll understand my keen interest in that episode. It belonged to the story of my place of work. And anyway, we clergy are as interested (or should be) in why people don't go to church as why they do.

Middlemarch was the first of her novels that I read. It was a good place to begin. It's not a perfect novel (is there such a thing?) but it's undeniably a very great one. Was it Virginia Woolf who said that it was one of the few novels written for grown-ups? In Middlemarch, many of the themes of her novels are worked out on a large canvas: human lives being lived out in small communities of dense networks and intricate relationships; the contrast between the intimate scale of ordinary human concerns and the broad sweep of a history that was, always is, changing the nation irrevocably; the place of church and religion in an industrialising and increasingly sceptical society; the portrait of a flawed clergyman surrounded by his books and driven by the need to uncover "the key to all mythologies". Was he, the unlikeable Casaubon, relentless pursuer of the inexplicable, too close for comfort? And was it significant that the book's beautifully drawn heroine Dorothea, a fictional creation Mary Ann must have been particularly fond of, had the same name as my mother?

If you are a priest, you live and work on these kinds of threshold all the time. Your task is to try to interpret how the various narratives we are part of interact and converse with one another: the larger, universal story of God as he is in the world in relation to the more intimate stories of who and what we are as men, women and children living ordinary human lives at particular times and in particular places. Of these, the church is a symbol that looks in both directions: worldwide and local, belonging to every place and to my place. "Mary Ann did not go" to her local church. But she never lost her interest in, her fascination with, religion. Church and clergy feature in most of her novels, as I point out in the lecture. Her last novel, Daniel Deronda, was as explicitly about religion as any English novelist of her century got.

In this respect, George Eliot brings an implicitly theological perspective to her characters and their settings. She knew enough about organised religion to respect it as an irreplaceable social glue and catalyst of moral good. Though she had also read the writings of honest doubters like Renan, Strauss and Feuerbach and knew not to invest religion with a metaphysical reality it can't sustain. For her, the continued potential of religion lay in the sentient dimension of imagination and feeling. Maybe she never quite grew out of a nostalgia for a secure and happy childhood in which religion played a central role. There's something rose-hued about Adam Bede and Scenes of Clerical Life as there is about the prelapsarian world of The Mill on the Floss before the flood. She was perhaps the quintessential embodiment of the Victorian crisis of faith: intellectually troubled but emotionally more attached than she might have admitted.

In all this, George Eliot is, I think, a theologian's novelist. Her range, intelligence and depth of insight are perhaps the closest an English novelist has ever got to Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Cor ad cor loquitur. A theologian recognises a kindred spirit, even when a theological heart is manifested in a different discipline. It was this, as much as anything, that first drew me to her writings. She was as important a discovery to me as John Henry Newman had been twenty years earlier, about whom I wrote a blog last month. And looking back as I do now, I see that the kind of Christianity I'm increasingly drawn to - liberal, questioning, generous, socially concerned, inclusive and above all, humane - owes more to her than I realised at the time.

I guess I recognised in George Eliot a novelist with a sense of place. I came to think of her as a geographer of the human spirit, at home in the landscape of the mind and a reliable guide to reading its map so as to chart our paths across it. But I also warmed to her physical sense of place. I'd moved to the Midlands from North East England and had felt the loss of its regional distinctiveness, its strong, definable character, the accents of both people and place. I think I was looking for a native voice who could help me find my home in "Loamshire", as Mary Ann called it. I came across these words in Daniel Deronda, new to me then though, I discovered, much quoted long before it became fashionable for some of us to describe ourselves proudly as "citizens of the world".

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.

Has the elusive idea of "sense of place", of the importance of being nourished by attachment and belonging, ever better been put into words? Every great novelist has this sense of place, whether it's Dickens' London, Hardy's Wessex or the Bronte's West Riding. But I hadn't realised how literature can help bond you to the particular geography you call your own until I needed it to do that for me. And although I now live a long way from Goerge Eliot's Midlands, I can't revisit them in my mind without construing the shapes and patterns of the human textures she laid over them in her writings. Only the greatest of writers achieves this to the point of depositing ideas and images in the mind that you know you'll never forget.

To mark the anniversary of her birth this week, Kathryn Hughes has been presenting A Life in Five Characters on BBC Radio 4. George Eliot never wrote an autobiography (if only she had! - wouldn't it have been one of the most luminous and intelligent of all nineteenth century lives?). Instead she wrote her life into her leading characters: Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, Janet Dempster in Janet's Repentance - a novella which was a new one for me, Silas Marner in the novel that bears his name, and finally, on her day itself, Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda.

Kathryn Hughes has also written an engaging piece in The Guardian in honour of the bicentenary, "What George Eliot's 'provincial' novels can teach today's divided Britain". She writes with the Brexit referendum in mind, and the current election campaign. "This recent habit of reducing people to types would have appalled Eliot. Her chief message is that we must learn to identify and honour the particular differences between us while acknowledging our shared humanity. Art is the nearest thing to life, she wrote in an essay in 1856. It is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.... Until we have understood what life is like for the Tullivers and the Dodsons, we are in no position to judge them for holding preferences and opinions that are so different from our own."

Verb sap. The great writer still speaks. Two hundred years on, we need to listen carefully.

The Prince, Privilege and Public Life

I wasn't going to watch the Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. Not out of a sense of propriety: there was more entertainment to be had on other channels that night.

But then I read some social media posts. And commentary in next morning's papers. I realised that bigger matters were at stake than mere royal titillation. So I sat down, logged on to the BBC iPlayer and started paying attention.

I don't want to speculate. I don't know whether the Prince was telling the truth or not (or at any rate the whole truth). I don't know what to make of his having "no recollection" of meeting Virginia Giuffre or having sex with her. I can't make any more sense of the notorious photograph of them together than he apparently can. I don't pretend to understand his memory of a precisely datable evening in the Pizza Express in Woking, or the clinical pathology that inhibits perspiration. I don't know how to evaluate his demeanour and body-language during the interview.

And I'm not clear whether the Prince's readiness to submit to this intense interrogation was courageous or foolhardy though the consensus is the latter. Others are experts: they must judge. All I'm competent to say anything about are the words he spoke, on the record, taken at their face value. And what these words mean when someone in public life speaks them, someone who is at the very pinnacle of the establishment by virtue of his being a senior member of the Royal Family.

In a modest way, as a clergyman, I've been in public life for most of my adulthood. I've learned a little about how exposed you are in a leadership role, how your words and actions are placed under an unforgiving spotlight you are never quite prepared for until you find yourself there. I've discovered, sometimes the hard way, how your behaviour is calibrated against the values of the organisation you serve (in my case the Church of England) and against your own professional and personal values, whether they are stated or implicit. ("Would Jesus have said or done this?") In a sense, you have no private life. You are not your own any more.

So watching the interview was a profoundly uncomfortable experience. I could all too easily imagine myself sitting across the table opposite Emily Maitlis for what I would probably remember as the most uncomfortable hour of my life. I could imagine myself perspiring (unlike the Prince) under her scrupulously courteous yet relentlessly forensic examination. I might persuade myself that I could bluff my way through it by turning on the charm, or rely on clever formulae rehearsed in coaching sessions. But I know I would not be capable of maintaining any pretence for more than a few minutes. An hour is a long time in the dock. The truth would out in the end. If it were me.

I don't know about Prince Andrew. Only he knows the full story. But let's make the presumption that his truth was told too, all of it, or at least all that was relevant to the scope of the interview. What did I make of that as I imagined myself in his shoes?

My answer is that if it were me, I would reckon that I'd already rendered myself unfit for public office. Both on the basis of what I hadn't said as well as what I had.

It's what the Prince didn't say that was most culpable. Jeffrey Epstein's record is not a matter of conjecture. He was a convicted sex offender. He procured ("trafficked") women and underage girls for sex with himself and others. The Prince's close association with him and the inevitable collusion with his lifestyle and behaviour would already have posed grave reputational risks. But for him not even to hint in the interview that he understood how Epstein's abuse of women and girls would have created victims who would be damaged for life is beyond culpable. Not to express the slightest care for or sympathy towards them, not to deplore Epstein’s behaviour would be incredible if we had not heard for ourselves this sound of a gaping royal silence.

As for what he did say, his only acknowledgment of any misjudgment, the only hint of having made a big mistake was in respect of visiting Epstein after his release from prison in order, he said, to terminate his relationship with him. That gives the game away: in that admission, the Prince was acknowledging that his relationship with Epstein was altogether toxic, hence the need to end it. There was a mysterious reference to "honour" in doing this face to face rather than through a phone call. Let us suppose so. But there's something oddly self-regarding about invoking your own sense of honour when the entire conversation has been about what most people would regard as at least flirting with serial dishonour. The register of self-justification hardly matched the narrative. It felt dislocated, out of context.

You'd have thought that the Prince would have been advised by his coaches to adopt a seriously contrite approach to this interview. Maybe to have said something like this. Yes, I've messed up badly. My behaviour has been at best self-indulgent, not to say unforgivable. And worst of all is the plight of the women and girls who were victims of my friend's predatory abuse with which, by my silence in not condemning it, I've colluded. How can I ever put right that terrible wrong done to them? How can I show them that the damage they have suffered will go on weighing on my conscience for the rest of my life just as it will forever haunt theirs? As it was, he came across as entitled people often do - not guided by the same moral compass most of us invoke when placed in ambiguous or compromising situations.

I'm trying not to speculate about things the Prince either denied or was silent about. I'm going only on what he said in front of us all. He must make up his own mind about what he does next. But if it were me, what would I do?

I was asking myself that question all through the interview. But it's really not that hard for me to answer. I'd have had to admit to a sense of shame that events had brought me to this point. I honestly do not think I could continue in public life in the light of it. Not with honour. I'd be too compromised by my past, and I'd risk in turn compromising the institutions in which I held a public role. If I said I'd be too ashamed to continue in office as a public leader, I'm not overstating it, I think. I recognise that it may feel different for a member of the Royal Family. But I'm also questioning whether it should be different. Honour and trust come into everything we do and are in our public roles. Leadership that is worth anything collapses if they are forfeited. So I would have to say that if it were me, I'd now have reached that point, and it was time for me to retreat back into private life with as much dignity as I could muster. Not because my reputation had been damaged beyond repair. Not even because of the harm I had done to my family, my associates and my institution. But because (I hope) I’d want to do the right thing as a matter of principle: taking responsibility for my behaviour and acting with integrity in the light of it.

In my leadership roles I've learned a lot from the Seven Principles of Public Life that people holding public office in appointed or elected roles are required to sign. These roles include health and education, the police, the courts, the civil service and national and local government. The Principles are: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and the example we set in leadership. We are right to prize such ethical standards and measure our behaviour in the light of them. We are right to expect that our leaders and representatives in public life will try at all times to live up to them.

I wonder what answer Emily Maitlis would have got if she'd put them to the Prince?

The Berlin Wall 30 years on

In old(er) age I find myself looking back on the times I’ve lived through and how they’ve shaped me over the seven decades I’ve been alive. I was born in 1950, the precise midpoint of the twentieth century. What have been the most significant events of world history that I can say have touched me personally in some way?

Any list is provisional of course. We can’t easily judge what events will prove defining in the grand scheme of things when we are too close to them. Even a lifetime can be too short to make sound historical judgements. There’s too much foreground; things don’t stay in place long enough to see them as part of the bigger picture. We need distance and perspective, and even then the relative significance of historical events and the meanings they carry can be hotly contested by historians. But I believe there are key “moments” in our own lifetimes that have already gathered the flow of history around them and acquired a kind of symbolic, even mythic, status.

So I’m speaking about my subjective experience of world events, those I remember as having a powerful effect on me in the first half of my life. My current seven candidates are these. (I wonder what yours are?) I’ve already blogged on two of them.

1962 The Cuba missile crisis;
1963 The assassination of President Kennedy;
1968 The student riots in France;
1969 The first moon landing;
1973 The accession of the UK to the European Communities;
1975 The end of the Vietnam War;
1989 The fall of the Berlin Wall.

On Saturday we shall commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the last of these. So let me reflect briefly on the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I paid my first visit to Berlin that very year, 1989. But I was too early to be part of history. It was June. That summer the Kirchentag, the great two-yearly gathering of German Protestant Christians, took place in Berlin. It was an amazing event. I stayed with a family in Dahlem in the then Western Sector. There was a bewildering variety of activities to take part in: lectures, seminars, music, film, theatre, art... and a lot of theological and political debate, not only in churches and lecture halls but on street corners and in pubs and clubs. Here in the UK we don’t have anything quite like this festival of culture and faith that draws tens of thousands of people, not least the young, from across the country for five days of intense engagement and festive enjoyment. I was struck by how much talk I overheard about “our common European home”, particularly of course the aspiration to unite Germany. It was exhilarating. But that summer talk of peace and reconciliation in Germany still felt like a beautiful dream, nothing more.

To gain some respite from all this heady stuff, I needed time to wander round the city, drink in the atmosphere of this extraordinary place. In particular, I wanted to visit the East. I recall a journey on the U-Bahn that took me from one part of West Berlin to another that entailed crossing under areas of the eastern sector and passing through long-abandoned ghost stations. From inside deep cuttings I could look up at the grim tower blocks of the East shielded by intimidating rolls of barbed wire laid above the rail tracks. By contrast, crossing Checkpoint Charlie on foot in either direction did not seem as big a deal as I’d expected, not for a westerner with a British passport. Even crossing back into the West didn’t entail a long wait or a search. It was a very different matter for East Berliners, that was clear. Security around the Berlin Wall did not suggest any lessening of tension at that fault line between the two Germanys, the two Europes and the two worlds of East and West.

Back at Coventry Cathedral where I worked at the time, we continued to pray for peace and reconciliation across Germany. We often thought of the German cities with which Coventry had special relationships, whose great churches had been bombed by the Allies just as Coventry Cathedral had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe raid of 14 November 1940. I’d visited three of them: Lübeck which was (just) inside the Bundesrepublik, Dresden, then in the GDR and Berlin which straddled both. There, I’d attended Kirchentag events in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on the Kurfürstendamm, whose spire, the so-called “Hollow Tooth”, damaged by Allied bombing in 1943, served as a much-loved war memorial in much the same way as Coventry Cathedral.

So you can imagine the feverish excitement on 9 November 1989 when the news broke that something remarkable was happening around, and on top of, the Berlin Wall. We were glued to our televisions, in our case a large old black-and-white (read on to discover why this detail is relevant). It was soon clear that not only had the Wall been breached but that the East Berlin security forces were doing nothing about it, watching, a few even smiling, while people took pick-axes to the fabric of the Wall and surged across newly opened gaps. That officialdom stood by and did nothing to stop this outbreak of unthinkable lawlessness is one of the abiding memories of that day. You’ll remember it well enough or will have seen the footage scores of times.

Having been in the city so recently, and given my Anglo-German parentage, I found it immensely powerful to watch these scenes, and extraordinarily moving too. All the more so because we were expecting to commemorate the anniversary of the dreadful “Night of Shattered Glass”, the Kristallnacht of 9 November 1938 that constituted the first concerted, violent Nazi assault on Germany’s Jewish community. Instead, we found ourselves celebrating this magnificent dawn of a new future for Berlin, and Germany, and Europe. If ever I watched an event that seemed to be an image of the kingdom of God, it was this breaking down of walls, this elimination of the barriers of division, this reaching across to fellow men, women and children in peace and friendship and hope.

It felt like one of the greatest moments of my life. It still does. I was back in Germany the following year, in Bavaria this time at a conference of young adults. The joyous hope-filled energy at that week’s gathering in the mountains was palpable. And participants were in no doubt that all of them were pledged to play their part as Christians in the reconstruction and renewal of a united Germany. And not just Germany. “Our common European Home” was back on the agenda in a revitalised way. And the handful of British Christians who were there were enthusiastically embraced as colleagues and friends in that great project. “The Cold War is over. We are all Berliners. We are all Germans. We are all Europeans” we agreed, in the spirit of John F Kennedy’s happy phrase when he came to the Wall on his unforgettable visit in 1963.

In a Wordsworthian way, it felt good to be alive and see this day. Indeed, I needed to do more than merely see it. I needed to bear witness to it because of the story that would undoubtedly reverberate across coming generations. We could not have foreseen how difficult this project of reunification would prove, what stresses and strains it would place on this new Germany that was rising from the ashes. We did not imagine how hard it would be to eradicate the division between the privileged West and the more deprived East, nor the rise of far-right populist politics in cities and towns of the GDR (and not only there). We believed that the European ideal would quickly vanquish old enmities and bring about a Europe that was democratic, prosperous and free. We thought we could glimpse “the end of history” and the emergence of a new world order of peace among nations.

How naïve, you may say, this “first fine careless rapture”. And yet across Europe, people of Christian faith, other faiths and of no explicit faith but immense good will continue to collaborate for the peace and flourishing of Europe and beyond it, the whole human family. My own Europeanism has always been an important part of my self-awareness - how could it not, given my parentage? But as I look back, I now see what an impetus the events of 1989 gave me to commit to my identity more consciously. Hence my profound disappointment and sadness at the prospect of Brexit, not to mention the challenges the European Project is facing in many other parts of our continent.

But on Saturday, we should celebrate all that the fall of the Berlin Wall promised, and the real achievements that have been wrought across a reunited Germany. On this thirtieth anniversary, it’s worth pausing to be grateful for what happened in November 1989 that raised the hopes of millions of people all over the world that oppressive regimes do not have absolute control over human lives. For if the events of that month seemed like an image of the kingdom of God, then we should go on praying “thy kingdom come” with the heartfelt conviction that lasting change can happen and the lives of nations, societies and people be permanently transformed for good. That’s a prayer to make our own during the commemorations that will take place on this weekend of Remembrance Sunday.

What about that black-and-white TV, you ask? It wasn’t long before the East German Embassy in London was closed. It had state-of-the-art TVs to give away. One of them found its way into our home. Not only was it a colour set, but it even had a zapper (aka remote). For our four children, not to mention their parents, Christmas came early that year!

Half-Term at Haydon: Isaac comes to stay

In other news, our 6 year old grandson Isaac has spent half-term with his grandparents here in Haydon Bridge. You’ll forgive me for laying aside the serious stuff I usually blog about. He has gone home today and we are missing him. The house is suddenly very quiet again.

It was an important week for him and for us. These were his first ever nights away from his parents. Would he lose his nerve about it at the last minute? Would he be overcome with homesickness while he was here? Would he cope with Halloween without his friends and neighbours to trick or treat? Would he sleep and eat properly? How would we fill the time? These were grown-up anxieties of course, not his. But they made us realise how out of practice we were at caring full-time for a youngster. It was as much a rite of passage for us as for him.

When I went to Leeds to pick him up, I knew I needn’t have worried. He was up for this great adventure. We spent most of the train journey talking about railways. He has obsessed about railways ever since he was a toddler. We looked at images of Mallard and Flying Scotsman in his steam loco magazine. We looked out for “Opa’s Train” on the East Coast Main Line (i.e. the Class 91 electric loco 91114 named Durham Cathedral which has my name on the cab door). He was quiet for a bit while he ate his sandwiches. I wondered what he was thinking about? The memory of saying goodbye to his parents and little sister perhaps? Or the prospect of being special for the week, having the undivided attention of his Nana and Opa?

We’ve had a great week. There was Shaun of the Sheep - Farmageddon at the Forum Cinema. The Tullie House Museum in Carlisle provided interactive Roman history and railwayana. We visited no fewer than three soft play centres - at Carlisle, Haltwhistle and Hexham. Isaac is confident and good at socialising, so he quickly finds friends to play with at these places. And it’s reading time for us adults. He came to the Oxfam book shop where I volunteer and enjoyed the novel sight of my struggling with the till to process his purchases (which included DVDs chosen for his sister and cousin: I was touched by his kindness, even if he looked expectantly at us to find the cash).

What else? We watched You Tube movies of Thomas and Friends and of sophisticated trains created out of Lego - another favourite activity of his). I read him Ronald Dahl’s Witches at bedtime, suitable literature for Halloween week (a funny, intriguing book - but a bit on the misogynistic side, I thought). He has a wicked sense of humour. Irony is going to be his forte one day, I think. He dressed up for Halloween, put a pumpkin in the window and enjoyed the comings and goings on the street. The level crossing in sight of our house was a reliable source of pleasure (thank you, Northern Rail and the RealTime Trains app). He was out of bed by dawn each morning, but we set him up with croissants and juice, and he was fine. We asked him for feedback on the week (quality of accommodation, meals, entertainment etc., with the options “good”, “very good” and “fantastic”). We did all right on the whole.

One of the nicest moments was at a soft play. A young parent came up to us and said, “That’s such a lovely polite boy you have there. You don’t often see behaviour like that these days.” This took us by surprise, not because it isn’t true (it is) but because it was unsolicited. That’s a big tribute to his own parents, of course, our daughter and her husband. And it made me realise how respectful Isaac was being during his time with us. He is no goody two-shoes, thank God, but he does say please and thank you, and at 6 o’clock in the morning bothers to knock on the bedroom door with “I’m sorry to wake you up but...”. Winsome. Endearing. Delightful.

We are lucky enough to be enjoying a retirement in which we have time to give our three colourful, talented, much-loved grandchildren Gabriel, Maddy and Isaac. As most grandparents discover, this is somewhat different from the memory of caring for our own children when they were at that age. The responsibility is bounded for one thing: there comes a time when you have to give your grandchildren back to their parents, and this affects the quality of the time we spend with them. Then there’s the fact that grandparents are at an altogether different life-stage from where we were when our children were young.

Then (and I’m aware this is a middle-class-professional’s perception), family time was heavily contested by the demands of the day job. My children are candid about how difficult I found it to be truly present to them when they were growing up. I wish I had been better at it. I really do. Grandchildren are not given to us as a second chance to make a better job of it - they are human beings in their own right who are growing up in a world in many respects very different from the one in which we tried to be good enough parents thirty or forty years ago. Our children have to bear the consequences of the mistakes we made in our parenting, and we have to live with the memory. The miracle is that mostly, they survive and flourish, despite as well as because of us. And that they seem able to forgive us.

But grandchildren do offer us the opportunity to reprise what should have been among the best experiences of our lives if we have been entrusted with the gift of children. For now, with the wisdom of years, we can try to give back something of what we have so abundantly received, and continue to receive, from those who love us. This came home to me not so much when we were enjoying outings or engaging in projects but in the quotidian uneventfulness of ordinary time: moments when we were content simply to be together whether it was at mealtimes, walking along to the village shops or reading to him at bedtime. Gone was that feeling I remembered so well that there was always something else I ought to be doing: a list of admin jobs to be tackled, a meeting to get to, parishioners to visit, sermons to write.

“What are days for?” asks Philip Larkin in his enigmatic poem. “They are to be happy in. Where we live but days?” It would be easy to project on to our grandchildren a kind of prelapsarian innocence and happiness that in adulthood we realise is lost to us. Was it ever like that? Even the best childhood is not without its shadows and its pain. Maybe our grandchildren can help us reconnect with our own childhood, not the rhapsodic dreamlike fantasy but the more ambivalent reality where the troubles of growing up are as keenly felt as the joy of being alive?

Our grandchildren are not there to heal our memories. But to be truly present to them, cherish them for the human beings they already are, love them as bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, learn how to listen and laugh and cry with them - all this is profoundly healing. It would be wrong to indulge the purple prose. It’s fatally easy to sentimentalise when writing about children. So I won’t pretend we haven’t worked hard this half-term, that there weren’t challenges we had to face. But I think I’ve glimpsed in a new way how life is pure gift. Growing old and becoming grandparents has a lot to commend it. “I love you so much” Isaac whispered when the time came to say goodbye. Heart speaking to heart when the words ran out.

It meant a lot that his parents entrusted him to us for these days away. God willing there will be many more weeks like this one for Isaac, and in time, for Maddy and Gabe. Meanwhile, we shall get used to the quiet once again. And look forward to catching up on our sleep.