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!

The Benefits of Brexit

Yes, you read that correctly. I want to write about the benefits of Brexit. It may be news to you that there could be any. Or at least, that I might imagine so. Am I losing my head?

I don't think so. For the avoidance of doubt, I've not changed my mind about Brexit. I believe it to be a disastrous decision for the United Kingdom. If you've been following this blog, you'll know that I've rehearsed the arguments ad nauseam. To me, it makes no sense either economically or politically. It cuts across the idea that I imagined was becoming mainstream opinion, that we are better off together than alone, that a world in which we collaborate to tackle the threats we face is more likely to be one in which we all live more safely and at peace with one another, care more effectively for the poor and vulnerable, share our resources in combating the climate emergency, and have more likelihood of flourishing. Pooling our sovereignty gives us leverage to achieve what is beyond the reach of any of our peoples separately. To me as a Christian, this comes down to loving our neighbour as ourselves. The best future for our world is based on relationships and community, not on isolation and self-interest.

I've not changed my mind about any of this. If anything, I believe in these (to me) self-evident benefits of EU membership more strongly than I ever did, the more I listen to the spurious arguments against them.

It's these very arguments, in fact, that lead me to think that Brexit could bring benefits after all. I have two in mind. The lesser benefit would be for the UK finally to rid the EU of the burden we have become to it. When you are a thorn in someone else's side, the kindest thing to do is to remove yourself from a relationship that is giving the other party so much grief. We don't deserve the longsuffering patience our European friends have shown to us British since 2015. And they don't need, and never needed, our foot-dragging, curmudgeonly, resentful attitude towards them as the EEC and then the EU, our reluctance ever to become fully-fledged Europeans who pull our weight in this family of nations.

The greater benefit would be that Brexit, hard or soft, would provide a response to David Cameron's endlessly repeated mantra before the referendum campaign, when he tried to renegotiate the UK's EU membership. "What's in it for Britain?" he kept asking, "What's in it for us?"

Here's my answer. What Brexit would (will?) achieve is quite simply to make it clear beyond any doubt that the UK has now become a very ordinary, very average, unexceptional middleweight nation. It no longer has a special role in the world, or at least a role that's any more special than any other nation. It has lost any credible claim to exceptionalism. It is one nation among many, better than some, not as good as others, a middling kind of power in global politics and economic strength that can expect to be overtaken in terms of influence, wealth and political clout by a dozen other nations in the next few decades.

Why would this be a benefit to Britain?

Simply because it would require us to pursue a more modest way of being in the world. From being a significant world power with enormous moral influence and reach across the globe, and with a strong sense of a unique British destiny, we would have to become used to a less exalted, more humble role such as we have not been had since at least the eighteenth century. We would have to learn to know our place.

All this would pose something of a spiritual and moral crisis for the United Kingdom. For if we were to learn true humility, it would require us as a nation to become a great deal more self-aware, more spiritually and emotionally intelligent, than we have been during this decade. It has been a national embarrassment to watch ourselves behaving as if we were suffering from some kind of corporate psychotic episode, a collective nervous breakdown. It's been instructive, if cruel, to read the commentary on Brexit in the overseas media, and see ourselves as others see us. We have become a source of bafflement even to our allies, and of scornful ridicule to our enemies. Brexit has already demonstrated its capacity to humble us in the sight of others. And this can only increase as the clock ticks down towards Hallowe'en and, as seems increasingly likely, we crash out of the European Unon without a deal.

The biblical and classical stories of what we tend to call a "fall" are essentially about how peoples, nations and individuals have to face the truth about themselves as a result of some tragic flaw or misplaced hubris, when grasp exceeds reach and we are toppled from some place of privilege or pride. This seems to me to be the crisis we are reaching in Britain. A crisis is literally a "judgment", and implicit in the idea of "fall" is that of nemesis, just deserts that are reaped not as a result of some external intervention but because of what we do to ourselves through our own presumption, how decisions and their consequences draw out of ourselves a hitherto unguessed potential for self-harm if not self-destruction.

In the case of Brexit, I think we can ascribe a good deal of this to the naked self-interest (not to say self-importance) that has dominated the EU debate for years. Instead of asking how our membership could benefit other members of the Union, all that has seemed to matter to us has been our own profit. And as the gospel says, if we strive to gain the whole world, we put at risk our own soul. This, I fear, is the condition Britain is reaching, may already have reached. Brexit has driven us to the brink of spiritual, ethical and moral bankruptcy. Appeals to collaborate for the sake of social justice, peace-making, security, the environment and the welfare of the most needy members of our society fall on increasingly deaf ears. The clamour is "do or die", Brexit at all costs, deal or no deal. If ever a nation was suffering a nervous breakdown that clouded judgment and common sense, this is it.

Which is why I'm reluctantly coming to the view that Brexit may actually be necessary if we are to come to our senses and be healed of this craziness. Could it be that to learn to see ourselves as a rather ordinary offshore island could be good for the national psyche? Could it be that this fall from perceived privilege could give us back our soul?  Could it be that the sheer shock of Brexit teaches us lessons we are incapable of learning in any other way. that it could bring us to our senses? I'm thinking of the prodigal son who lost everything in his far country, and only then began to find himself again and make the long journey home.

"He that is down need fear no fall; he that is low no pride" wrote John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress. I wonder what this quintessentially English writer would say to the Britain of the twenty-first century. I think he would tell us that humility is the first lesson we need to learn if we are to become truly wise and, in any sense that ultimately matters, truly great in our moral stature and spiritual character. St Benedict, patron saint of Europe, says the same which is why he devotes so much space to humility in his Rule. It's a principle we have forgotten in the shrill politics of our time. If "righteousness exalts a nation", then humility is the first step to it.

I'm resigned to Brexit now. I shall continue to resist it by any means possible, especially in its no-deal incarnation. But in my waters, I don't believe it can be avoided. I won't deny that I feel unutterably despondent about the prospect of waking up on All Saints Day no longer a citizen of the European Union. But something in me says that this could be a profoundly important moment in the history of our nation. If, after 1 November, we begin to experience buyer's remorse and ask ourselves, as I think we are likely to, "how on earth could we have committed such a foolish act?", it could lead to a new seriousness in public life that restored truth-seeking to the place it ought to have occupied all along. It could be a kind of conversio.

If that in turn helped foster a more realistic self-understanding on the part of the nation, a more sober perception of our place in the world, an altogether more humble view of ourselves and our destiny, that would have to be a good thing, wouldn't it? And if we were to find ourselves more free of our historic ambitions for power, hegemony, growth, influence and wealth, it might just bring about our capacity to become the best selves we have it within us to be. It would put us back on the path of healing and reconciliation after years of bitter division, help us be at ease with ourselves once again. That would be a vocation worth pursuing. We might well be a sadder nation, but I think we would be a better and a wiser one.

The hectoring, relentlessly upbeat Brexit rhetoric of Boris Johnson and his government doesn't encourage me to think that this will happen very soon. But in the longer term, under a leadership that is less in thrall to romantic notions of past greatness, and more realistic in scanning horizons and responding intelligently to events, change might be possible. And then we shall need to apologise - to our European neighbours whose friendship and trust we have abused, and to the people of Scotland and Ireland in particular who will find it hard to forgive the English for the forces of disintegration that we have unleashed. Indeed, saying sorry and meaning it is always important evidence that we have learned from our mistakes and can begin to tell the truth about ourselves once more.

Which is what humility, recognising our ordinariness and knowing our place are all about.

Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 12: Memories of the Balkan Wars

Wednesday 5 June
At Vukovar. This is one of the few calling points on this cruise whose name is familiar. Mohacs, Vidin, Pleven, Tulcea, Novi Sad, Rousse, Cernavoda... maybe I ought to have heard of these because they are all sizeable towns but I hold my hand up to admit that I haven’t. (Yes I know, of course we’ve heard of Budapest, Bucharest and Belgrade too... but these are capital cities, so there’d be no excuse.) But Vukovar? Surely everyone who lived through the 1990s and was paying even the slightest attention to the news from beyond our shores has heard of this little place on the Croatian (south) bank of the Danube. For this was right in the front line of the Yugoslav War between Serbia and Croatia, and took a terrible hammering in the conflict in the autumn of 1991.

Our young guide is one of the best we’ve had on this voyage. She tells us she studied English and German at university, but she has an intellectual and cultural hinterland that’s impressive. She cuts straight to the chase as we form up in our group. “Over there you can see the town’s water tower, built in the 1970s. It was hit in the war of 1991. It’s a symbol of all that Vukovar suffered in that year. This city was almost completely flattened in the war. Those buildings that weren’t destroyed were riddled with bullet holes that bear witness to the ferocity of the fighting. Some of them are being restored but others have been left as they are, as a memorial to the conflict of that year.”

I was in my early forties in 1991. At Coventry Cathedral where I worked at the time, we raised money for the victims of the conflict and filled enormous skips with foodstuffs, medical supplies, blankets and children’s toys for Vukovar. But I’m ashamed to say that I had only the vaguest understanding of the political and ethnic roots of this conflict that was happening, not on the other side of the world but in our own continent of Europe. In particular, I had forgotten that the Danube was the front line of the war between Serbia and Croatia; neither had I remembered the three month Siege of Vukovar, nor one of the very worst of the atrocities, the assault on the town hospital when two hundred non-Serbian patients and staff were taken away in trucks, corralled in a remote farmhouse for three days, then slaughtered like cattle. And they were only some of the many thousands of victims (on both sides) who perished by the Danube that year.

This is the first time we’ve felt that a guide has been candid with us about the events of a quarter of a century ago. Of course, the narrative is much more complex than a tour guide can possibly present in a few minutes. But there’s no dispute that the war happened as a direct result of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milocevic’s expansionist plans for a Greater Serbia, aided by Serbian militia leaders, in particular Jaradan Karadic, This is the “secret in the family” that we’ve found it so hard to penetrate in conversation with Serbians. It is incredibly hard for them to speak about their recent shameful past. It’s always easier for the victim to tell the story than the oppressor who has been shamed before the world, as the trials for war crimes and genocide at The Hague have done.

So I ask our Croatian guide about relationships with Serbia today. “They are normalising” she says, without hesitating, but I suspect choosing her words with care. “Another generation has grown up since those days. The young think in different ways from their parents and grandparents. This country is now a member of the European Union. My generation wants to break down barriers, not erect them. So our relations with Serbia are no different from those with any other of our neighbours. Maybe she wants to add, “even if the history will still haunt us for many years to come.” The healing of memories doesn’t happen in a few short years. And as I’ve written already, the ethnic fault lines haven’t gone away. 30 per cent of Vukovar’s population is Serb. In this Catholic country, there are sizeable minorities of Orthodox believers. And although religion did not (she says) play a part in the Croatian conflict (which sets it apart from those in Bosnia and Kosovo), its temples and rituals still act as markers of identity. Peace and reconciliation are real enough here, I think. But it’s sobering to realise how hard-won they are, how fragile they must continue to be for decades to come.

She is speaking as we drive past the railway station. “We don’t have trains any more” she laments. The building is ruinous. It cuts a forlorn figure among the twenty first century industrial and commercial buildings going up all round it. I badly want to get out and photograph this poignant scene, but time is not on our side. I do my best from the coach and wonder, not for the first time on this cruise, how humanity can be so brutal to its own kind, how little our race has learned from the relentless wars and conflicts that have bloodied the soil of our continent.

We are reminded that Croatia has been a member of the EU since 2013, the second of the former Yugoslav states to join (the first was Slovenia which joined as far back as 2004 and is in the Eurozone, unlike Croatia). I ask what effect EU membership has had on the country. It’s mixed, says our guide. On the one hand the young especially value the freedom of movement they didn’t know before. On the other hand, there has not (yet) been much inward investment to show for member status, so there’s been a brain drain of young bright able professionals to Germany especially, and also (surprisingly?) Ireland. She doesn’t mention the EU funds that have helped reconstruct the country since the war and developed its transport infrastructure, particularly here in Slavonia. A long way from the national capital Zagreb and the country’s celebrated coast, East Croatia is not much visited by tourists. Which is why she thanks us for coming to this less well known part of her country. It’s sincerely meant.

40 kilometres over the level plain and along an arrow-straight road stands the city of Osijek, the fourth largest in Croatia. The name means “ebb tide” because it stands slightly above the marshlands of the Drava flood-plain that always threatened to flood the environment. Murad of antiquity, it was a colonia of the Empire in Hadrian’s time. After the Ottoman centuries it was taken by the Habsburgs in the late seventeenth century and the old city is hallmarked with Austro-Hungarian splendour. The eighteenth century town includes grand military buildings, a courthouse and a Friary with a large baroque church popularly known as Saint Antony’s. Of Padua, this one, patron saint of lost things and lost causes, depicted on a large eighteenth century painting of dubious quality but undeniable charm, and better still, in a contemporary sculpture outside, He is holding the infant Jesus seated on the book of the scriptures, a pose familiar all over Europe. “Tony, Tony, come around, / Something’s lost and must be found” quips our guide.

And indeed we seem to be back in the catholic west in this royal free city where the spirit of Empress Maria Theresa might have walked last week. You feel that Budapest and Vienna can’t be far away. Trinity Square, surely one of the most elegant piazzas in Europe, is dominated by a column dominated by a baroque sculpture of the Holy Trinity. It was put up in 1729 to give thanks for the end of the plague Osijek had suffered and that had carried off some of its most distinguished citizens. I can’t recall ever having set eyes on a full-blown sculpture of the Trinity before, certainly not in a public square. I’m uneasy about the theological propriety of this, if I’m honest, but the patron or sculptor would no doubt reply that if it’s permitted to paint the Trinity, why should a sculpture be inappropriate? But this is precisely the point. What our visits to Orthodox churches have taught us is that painting is an entirely different medium from plastic sculpture. A two-dimensional drawing or painting is a “projection” that demands to be read in a symbolic way (because that’s the only way to make sense of it). A three dimensional “representation” - a bust, a statue - risks being reified into an object in its own right as if to say, the reality is just like this, only bigger. That clearly won’t do in a monotheistic religion. Which is why the iconoclastic controversy is so important in the development of the separate artistic traditions of the churches of the east and the  west.

This old city would be the perfect imperial picture postcard except for one thing: the pockmarked buildings that remind us of a conflict much more recent than the War of the Spanish Succession or the Napoleonic campaigns. Eight hundred people were killed when the town was shelled from August 1991 to June 1992, about half the total number of citizens from Osijek killed in the Croatian War of Independence. And lest my account has seemed to be heavily tilted against the Serbian expansionism that gave rise to the conflict in the first place, its important to recall that at least five Croatian officials were indicted for war crimes against the Osijek Serbs. Here as everywhere else, conflict brutalises all its participants. In these Balkan wars, everyone was a victim in the end. As was truth, always the first casualty of war.

The complete story, inevitably much more complex and intractable than popular narrative, has yet to be told here in the lower Danube. Some historians say we are not even close to gaining a full perspective on the Great War more than a hundred years ago, let alone this one. It takes time for history to coalesce, settle down into a shape and configuration that its participants can own for themselves. Just as I’m aware, as the cruise comes to an end, that my own first impressions of it jotted down in this blog will take time to mature, become nuanced, even begin to do justice to the complexity of what I have seen and learned in this fortnight on the river. How do you take in such a tangled, such an ancient, such a contested political history from the deck of a luxury cruise ship and the window of an air-conditioned coach? What, intellectually speaking, is “responsible tourism” in these circumstances?

We wander round Osijek’s civic centre, a triangular piazza where the only wheels allowed apart from bicycles and push chairs are the trams. They have been running for 135 years, says our guide proudly. So this is a real city. It feels lively enough to qualify, even if it only has a pro-cathedral, the red brick neo-gothic church of St Peter and St Paul whose spires dominate the town. Outside, children are playing in the fountains and clambering on to a bronze sculpture depicting the citizens of Osijek. By the marina coffee shops are doing a brisk trade. There’s a holiday atmosphere here. The long summer school vacation is about to begin.

As we arrive back at the ship, a few of us notice what looks like a haphazard pile of concrete slabs on the grass by the quayside. This turns out to be a striking and eloquent sculpture. The slabs have been cut, presumably from buildings destroyed in the war, with triangular heads to resemble rough-hewn tombstones. On each is a “found” relic of the conflict - a piece of shattered glass, a graffito, pieces of twisted steel. The stones are all leaning over at crazy angles like a procession of dominoes frozen at the moment of toppling. For this is indeed “the toppling city”, a town so completely shattered by war yet with its spirit, even in the act of falling, not torn from it, not yet, not ever. It reminds me of the “Plumb Line and the City” sculpture in Coventry Cathedral where the uprightness and integrity of a community, symbolised by buildings of every shape and size, is measured against Amos’ vertical plumb line suspended above it. Here, nothing is straight, nothing is true, nothing stands upright any more.

And yet the spirit of the place, its daemon if you like, is undefeated despite the worst that the aggressor can do. Why did not our excellent guide mention it when the sculpture is clearly meant to be the first thing you see when you land in this damaged but powerfully evocative place? It’s another of those visits on this cruise that would not be on anyone’s bucket list for scenic beauty but is so well worth spending time in for all that it has to tell us about the times in which we live.

So taken am I with this sculpture that I forget to check the time. I am the last on board, only a couple of minutes late, but nonetheless chided for it (in the nicest possible way). Everyone knows that I'm the one the ship is waiting for because when we go ashore, we check ourselves out with our electronic key cards, and check back in again when we return. I'm sure this is a detail of twenty-first century cruising that readers of this blog would want to know about.

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The ship sets off on its last and longest leg back upstream to Budapest. The community resumes its dreamy existence dislocated from the historical turbulence of these troubled shores. There is afternoon tea in the lounge with cakes and conversation to enjoy. Apart from that I spend the afternoon on deck watching the miles of forest drift by, interspersed by the occasional settlement that has gathered round a white baroque church spire. I realise again how remote this landscape is, how little populated. I’ve already written about the lack of drama on this cruise compared with the Upper Danube and still more the Rhine. There is little to see other than at the high points of any Danube voyage such as the Iron Gates. But this very evenness is part of the beauty of it, this fortnight of green, ordinary time that has a mesmeric, almost retreat-like quality because of the way it distends the cycles of each day. Millions of trees, vast expanses of water, wide skies become all the more miraculous when there is nothing else to look at. This for me is the most important spiritual insight of this fortnight. As I’ve said, it makes a contemplative out of me - or has the potential to if only I will let it.

But there is one moment of drama that takes us by surprise and has us holding on to our hats - literally. We’ve all noticed how high the river is at present, flooding the banks, invading the forests, its level even swallowing up the bottom of the tree canopy. We approach a border bridge that carries a railway line. It can scarcely be higher than the height of this ship’s bridge. In fact, we would collide with it were it not for some clever technology that lowers the entire bridge, foremast and everything else protruding above deck level. One of the crew walks along and tells us to sit down as we pass underneath. You could literally touch the steel girders. If the river were a few inches higher, this stretch would be impassable to ships like ours. It’s an exciting photo opportunity we SLR brigade are not expecting.

By dinner time I’m left entirely alone on deck. I’ve loved these hours of solitude with the woods and the water and the reddening sky. It’s like being on the beach when everyone else has packed up their things and gone home. It’s a travel-writing cliché to talk about the magic of such moments. It would take a Delius to find a musical language that could do justice to this peace and tranquility of a Summer Night on the River. And a Wordsworth to do the same in poetry, given that we are sailing on his eponymous ship.

Tonight there’s a pub quiz to test our knowledge of the Danube and the places we’ve visited. Our foursome does pretty well, though we struggle to match memories and mental images to so many of these places with (to us) unpronounceable names. Two weeks of five countries with their distinctive landscapes, cities and towns, their churches and mosques, their citadels and antiquities, flow into one another. How did that great Danubian writer Patrick Leigh Fermor keep his memories distinct, unentangled, write it all down with a hindsight that was so clear, so focused?

But maybe it doesn’t matter too much. What matters is the experience of the river and its people that has touched us, maybe changed our perceptions in important ways. Could it have been transformative? Only time will tell.

The ship sails on towards Hungary.

Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 3: The Iron Gates Gorge

Monday 27 May
We have been reminded to put our clocks forward by an hour overnight. We are entering Eastern European Time. The Orient can't be far away. But the capsule we are living in is very much of the privileged west. As, no doubt, will be the perspectives of most of us on board. The question is, how can the sounds and savours of the east begin to penetrate what is in effect a luxury hotel on water? I have to say I have a conscience about the contrast between our lifestyle on board and the simplicity, not to say poverty, of some of the riverine communities we are passing through.

What does it mean to be an ethical tourist in eastern Europe? On this journey I've been reading a book about someone else's Danube journey.* The author, Andrew Eames, is scathing about these cruise ships that bear elderly, affluent, well-fed westerners to these lands in such a way as to keep them inoculated against any real exposure to their cultures. I think there's a degree of envy in that sweeping judgment. But the challenge is important: how to allow travel make me more aware, how to be a voyager with a conscience? I doubt it's the last time I'll entertain these questions.

We awaken to a change of scenery. Gone are the flatlands of Pannonia, the Hungarian Plain that seems to stretch for ever beyond Budapest. Now the river is sneaking through high wooded hills, Romania to the north, Serbia, still, to the south. There is time to enjoy the landscape as it glides by. We have decided that first thing in the morning it will be allowed to sit quietly on our own and not seek out the company of other travellers. We introverts like quiet breakfasts.

But to my right a conversation is going on not about the Danube but about the EU Parliamentary election results that have come through overnight. The general consensus at that table seems to be that the outcome is inconclusive. Everyone is an expert on Brexit these days. I am dismayed to learn that the North East has elected not one but two members of the newborn Brexit Party, which is one more hard Brexiter than before. We sail on midway between an EU member state on one side and a candidate-state on the other. As one state comes in to the Union (or plans to), another comes out (or plans to). What goes round comes round. For the Danube as an EU boundary, substitute the English Channel or the Irish Sea. Only here, where two nations separated by a few hundred yards of water gaze across the EU frontier at one another, the paradoxes of “Europe” seem all the sharper.

Conversations at meal tables tend to be a sharing of travellers’ tales. “Have you ever made one of these river cruises before?” is a standard opener after introductions have been made. This is our third, so we are graduates with plenty to say about the Upper Danube and the Rhine, the relative merits of cruise operators and their ships, their policies on who sits where at dinner. People are less curious about where we come from and hardly at all about who we are and what we have done with our lives. We’ve often remarked on that and wondered why other people are less inquisitive than we are.

Back to the Danube. We are sailing between the Carpathian Mountains to the north and the Balkans to the south. This stretch of the river known as the Kazan Gorge was notoriously dangerous once upon a time, because of the violent rapids and the rocks just below the surface. The Iron Gates barrage was constructed in the early 1970s as a joint hydro-electric project between Romania and Yugoslavia. This created a lake 100 km long upstream, drowning towns and villages in the process. I wish I’d seen the Danube in spate roaring down this defile between the sheer limestone cliffs. But the scenery is dramatic, fjord-like, even if the adrenaline rush, the frisson of navigating treacherous waters has long been a thing of the past.

Along the gorge, just as I’m finishing my scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, we pass a beautiful orthodox monastery, and soon after, the huge (and absurd) stone statue of Decabolos carved into the cliff on the Romanian side. He was the ruler of the Dacians for whose territory the Roman Empire had ambitions because of its valuable gold deposits. In the end, and not without difficulty, Trajan overcame Dacia, creating out of it the only Roman Province north of the Danube, hence the name Romania. I miss seeing Trajan’s memorial on the opposite bank (how could that happen? it's one of the most important antiquities on this journey!), but I have promised him that I shall look out for it on our return next week.

There is much excitement as we enter the Iron Gates lock. It’s two locks actually, because the fall of the river is nearly 40 metres. It is far from being a beautiful sight, but it is intensely interesting to watch this huge engineering achievement at work. And photogenic, as all of us who are photographers are not slow to realise. Most people gather at the ship’s bows, but I find the stern more evocative; maybe in older age I’m tending to look back on where I’ve been rather than forward on where I may be headed, or maybe it’s just an obvious (and less breezy) place for back-row Anglicans like me to linger.

Anyway, peering back into the dark recesses of the empty lock as we leave it strikes me not only as an interesting photographic image, but as an eloquent metaphor of passing through some key stage in life, some rite of passage. My own retirement four years ago comes to mind as we make this transition from one level of engagement to another. It’s a better image than the watershed because in a lock, the river is the same and the waters are the same, yet the retrospect and prospect are markedly different. Up on the hillside above the lock is a large blue tablet with a red star and the name TITO. Serbia looks back to halcyon South Slavic days.

Beyond the lock the scenery flattens out so we go for lunch. At our table is a single passenger who tells us that when she opened her toilet bag on the first morning on board, she realised she had forgotten all her medication. She has nothing but praise for the onboard team, one of whom comes with her into town, takes her to the hospital, translates for her as she explains her condition to a doctor with no English, then drives her to the pharmacy to collect the medication. Luckily she had her prescription with her prescription, something I’m always careful to do too.

We sail on. A stiff breeze has sprung up. Most people have gone inside for shelter but I stay out on deck with my camera. The river is immensely wide now. Even our long ship a full 135 metres from end to end seems dwarfed by all this water. The Danube is languid, no longer the swift mountain stream it was even as far down as Budapest. Behind us the mountains are receding. But we glimpse another line of hills, bluish on the distant horizon. Could it be Transylvania, the romantic "land beyond the woods"?

As I think of Matthew Arnold’s poem ("The Buried Life") about the river as a metaphor of human existence, fast-moving and energetic in its early stages, purposeful and well-paced in its mature middle phase, slow-moving towards the end as it nears the sea - calm and peaceful you could say, or maybe just lazy and listless. Below the Iron Gates, the Danube has become a river in old age. It settles down to its characteristic uneventful landscape setting that we recall from sections of the Upper Danube. But now it goes on and on for mile after mile. Alder, poplar and birch line the river banks, interrupted every now and then by villages, a few industrial towns, and fishermen’s bothies. You could imagine that the Black Sea is just round the next bend. But it’s not. There are more than 500 miles still to travel. This is a river with longevity. Its final senility, that’s to say its loss of identity, its falling apart into different bits of itself as it dissolves in the Danube Delta is a long way off yet.

The day has been warm but overcast with an even whitish light that photographers don't greatly care for. It’s true that the lack of shadows makes the landscape look bland and featureless. But low contrast has possibilities too. On the north bank, quite a distance away, I spot a group of half a dozen trees, with a couple of outliers. The river in front is slightly ruffled in the breeze, so the reflections have interesting textures. I take a series of studies from our open cabin window and am pleased with the results. All light is God’s light, whether it’s sharp and dramatic, or even and low in contrast.

There is a quiz in the lounge tonight. But we’ve had enough socialising for one day. We need time to ourselves for quiet restfulness. We go up on deck to enjoy a radiant sunset. Then back to the cabin to ponder the day's experiences and try to get my thoughts into words while the memories are fresh. 

* Andrew Eames, Blue River, Black Sea: a journey along the Danube into the heart of the New Europe (Black Swan, 2010).