Battered but still there

WHEN my good friend Heidi, a German who worked in our prison service and spoke six languages, decided the UK was not for her because of Brexit she left for Sweden. She shared out some of her belongings before she went, giving me a couple of flags including this little EU flag on a stick.

I hung it up on one of our garden sheds, a mark of defiance at the madness which has swept our nation and the frustration which has dragged the country through three years of ‘negotiations’ which frankly a bunch of toddlers could handle better.

The flag is in our back garden but I imagine you can see it from the top floor of the house across the street. I don’t know if the old fella who lives there is a Leaver or a Remainer but either way I guess he would have a reaction to it.

Anyway, this little flag flutters in the wind, sometimes so much that it gets wrapped up and poked by the pointy bit on the end of the stick. Hence the holes in the flag, almost purposely done through two of the stars. It’s frequently blown off its moorings on the shed, only for me to pick it up off the floor and reattach in the morning while I nurse a cuppa.

One morning, it had gone. Not on the floor or anywhere in the garden. I wasn’t sure what had happened and I refused to believe some skullduggery had befallen the little flag because quite frankly if you are going to break in to our garden, stealing the flag would be a pretty poor haul for a burglar.

Last week, it was back. On the floor. Near the shed. I couldn’t have missed it before so I can only assume it had fluttered into next door’s garden who decided they had had enough of the EU flag and threw it back over the fence.

As I reattached it to the shed, I pondered the state of it as it merrily fluttered away again. Battered, worse for wear, needing repair, a bit faded. And it struck me that it seemed to be an analogy for the EU itself.

The UK is in the midst of a sort of civil war (though there is nothing civil about it). The past three years have given us drama, anger, frustration and disbelief at the manoeuvrings of the ruling party, hell bent on removing us from the EU. Yet like this little flag fluttering in the garden, the EU is still there. Still a beacon for those of us here in the UK who believe we are stronger united, with peace and trading with our European cousins. Absolutely no-one can predict how this week will pan out (except the PM’s advisor Dominic Cummings who appears to have taken on the mantle of God these days) but somewhere in Wymondham, a little flag continues to be defiant, continues to be a symbol of hope that our nation can yet be saved.