It's our ancestors what's to blame

I set off to meet a friend for coffee at a very nearly secret café beside the Thames – almost secret because Google Maps didn’t know of it.

Friend Zsolt put the café’s location as ‘on the other side of the Thames from Ham House.’ That didn’t help Google but I thought this ocean navigator would find it easily enough.

Telling you yesterday about this rendezvous that didn’t happen, I related how it brought me face to

face with the negative thinking that almost doubtlessly dominated the minds of the majority of anti-EU Brexit voters.

I put the negativity down to race, or more precisely the different look that people from around the Middle East have compared with Brits.

Cavemen days

Generally, these new arrivals are darker of skin and features, so among a pale-skinned people they stand out.

Nothing wrong with that, no doubt. But a keen awareness of it has been in our genes since our caveman days. Beware of strangers, our ancients believed. So if all your neighbours plus or minus are fair-skinned and then quite suddenly, comparatively, a large percentage are dark, it is natural to be wary. Like it or not, it is human nature.

However, it might also be human nature to spit on the street, and to act in a canine-like manner with urine. Fortunately – blessedly – we’ve managed to get the better of that.

All over Europe, the influx of refugees has changed and is changing society. Every so often, stories are told of 'refugees' taking advance of the emergency. And, sad to say, many Britons being human, encouraged by ‘popular’ newspapers, resent it, feel they are being taken advantage of.

Putting one and one together

What has Brexit to do with supplying refugees? Nothing. But, rather obviously, the majority have put one and one together and shown that their maths has improved little since primary school.

As Sunday’s adventure told, I was no more successful than Google Maps in finding the café. And it added up to a very long and unsuccessful walk on a furiously hot day.

Then came the confrontation and Brexit-like shock from two public hoardings, as I mentioned yesterday.

I gave up the walk and jumped on a bus. Settled upstairs on the 281, that primitive sort-of-Brexit feeling was stirred again. At each of the several following stops, young men – hardly more than youths – climbed up the bus stairway.

Not one looked local, even if all of them wore the newish hairstyles that proclaimed they were with-it, an' that and local although amusingly 'short back and sides' used to be loathed in my young days…
Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com