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As a forty-something parent I sympathise profoundly with my parents' desire to give their children what they imagined to be a good time: then I regarded it as a savage intrusion on my liberty.Adulthood laid bare the historical process which had set these dismal afternoons in train. Even now, three decades later, the experience sticks in my head as a compound of wasp-stings, discarded apple cores, skinned knees, the Top Forty playing on Radio One and, as neither my brother or sister were good travellers, the smell of vomit. Weather (rarely promising) or infant protests were as nothing: the urge was as primeval and unstoppable as the pulse which drives a lemming over the edge of a cliff.And so, sandwiches packed up in their Tupperware boxes, mackintoshes lying folded in the car boot, we would arrange ourselves across the back seat of my father's ancient Hillman and be driven off to picnic in some wind-scorched cornfield or behind a chilly dune abutting the grey North Sea, dabble our toes in a few inches of ice-cold seawater or take afternoon tea in some fly-ridden eaterie in Sheringham High Street. As a child, as a teenager, deep into an adult life strewn with children and familial obligations, I regarded Bank Holidays with an almost pathological horror.
Growing up in the Norfolk of the 1970s, with two working parents who appreciated the occasional day-trip, a Bank Holiday produced only one response: the compulsion to "go out" somewhere. "The crowds in Brighton weren't so bad," he reported to a friend, "but of course it was an awful business getting back ... the train being so packed that people were hanging out of the windows." Even to a professed man of the people, keen on communal diversion and the sight of the populace out enjoying itself as it saw fit, a Bank Holiday could come as a bit of a strain. Lighting upon this passage for the first time in one of Orwell's letters, I experienced a righteous twinge of fellow feeling. Having borrowed some money from a wealthy friend on the Saturday night, he took a Sunday morning train down to Brighton "for the first time in my life" and spent a self-absorbed day and a half picking bluebells and hunting out birds' nests in the fields beyond the shoreline.
They require a far more politically integrated polity - a superstate, if you will - than Europeans have as yet dared to create.The writer is Professor of Government at Harvard and author of 'The Idea of a European Superstate', to be published next month. Then, on the Monday afternoon, came the problem of negotiating a passage home. Seventy years ago this month, solitary amid a London seething with King George V's Silver Jubilee celebrations, George Orwell set about planning a Bank Holiday jaunt. It also needs to redesign its welfare systems for a world where people live a long time, have few or no children, and are likely to pursue a range of jobs over the course of their lives. The reforms necessary are best tackled at the European level. A western Europe ringed by such regimes is no recipe for future security and prosperity.In contrast, the Eurosceptic right trumpets its commitment to nationalism. It values the preservation of national identity - which in Britain boils down to the preservation of "Westminster sovereignty" - no matter what the cost to security and prosperity.
