Canterbury Tales

I spent much of today in Canterbury, balmy under the strong spring sun. In the afternoon, after an al fresco pasta lunch, I spoke to the local University of the Third Age (U3A), on my life as a foreign corespondent — the highs and lows of roaming the world, from the Vietnam War to my latest trip to Brazil. The U3A audiences (if ‘audience’ is the right word, in this case) are always among the best and the most responsive of all the groups I talk to, heavy with retired teachers of one kind and another, and inevitably with a few people in the room who lived and worked in the places I’ve reported from.

Later I moved to the Friends Meeting House, to lead a discussion on War and Peace. Not only were several local LibDem councillors and activists gathered, but also pro-Europeans from both the Labour and Conservative parties, so there was a warm reception to my argument that a more co-ordinated European Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) would mean that Europe could use its weight and experience to promote both peace and development in areas of conflict around the world. In the meeting house room was one LibDem Councillor, Brian Staley, whom I first met in Saigon in 1969; the eminent psephologist Michael Steed whom I’d met in Manchester a year before that; and Maureen Tomison, whom I had known as a keen Conservative European activist before she left the party because of its Europhobia — and suddenly found herself the Labour candidate fighting Michael Howard in Folkestone at the last general election. As the old cliché goes, it’s a small world!

Link: www.u3a.org.uk