Reading about the demands made by the European Union to an aspirant departing member, I remembered my older daughter's expensive difficulties in getting out of a gym contract she'd signed up to in London. Despite the fact that she had moved away from London and consequently couldn't use any of the gym's services, it turned out that she was enmeshed in the organisation and had committed to payments she could not afford but that would have to continue until some distant future moment. This was because, although she hadn't been told at the time she joined - in fact, like the EU with Maastricht and Lisbon and all the rest of them, the company changed its rules after her membership began ("but we sent out an email about it, and if you didn't agree, you were supposed to reply") - that was the deal.
Never join anything is the only lesson from both experiences, if you ask me. Oh yes, and the European Union is really just an enormous gym-chain-scam - or gym chains are mini-European Unions. One or the other.
I've learned to keep my mouth shut in Lewes, as most of my peers seem to be unable to comprehend that I can be both passionately pro-European and deeply sceptical about the EU. Indeed, it's my love of European countries that makes me antipathetic towards any process that introduces a creeping uniformity.
ReplyDeleteI'm all in favour of a looser form of European union, just not the European Union in its current incarnation, which seems to want to become another superpower. I also have an instinctive dislike of men like Juncker.
On the other hand, I find a lot of the Brexiteers quite ghastly too, with their thoughtless bluster, so I usually manage to upset nearly everyone at the dinner table.
I've not yet unfolded my promised experiences with BMW, nor commented on Baedeker and one-horse station taxis - do not get me started on Juncker etc or we will be here forever and ever ( my two, brief, comments are a. I thought religion was dead until I met a few Remainers and b. please tell me there are no other men anywhere on the planet who can be characterised as "like Juncker")
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