Across the pond

To Axminster bright and early to stock up the larder and fill my wallet. Just as I was stuffing the notes in my wallet there was an angry voice in my ear.

‘This machine has been skimmed. Cost me £400.’

A young man pushed past me.

‘Look this is how they do it. See this hole here.’

He pointed to what he said was a hole on the right hand side of the machine and then felt underneath the top left of the machine, which, he said, was where they put the camera. He could not feel anything so he went storming inside to take it up with the Tesco management.

He was back in a trice.

‘They say its nothing to do with them. I have to ring the bank.’

So he wrote down the number of the Royal Bank of Scotland and went off to his car to ring them on his mobile. On his way he told me.

‘It’s them Roumanian scumbags. I wouldn’t have them in the country, even if they weren’t skimming cash machines. I would have them all shot.’

Back at home there was a new worker on my drive, probably in his middle fifties. He had just moved here from Oxford where he had lived for all his life. He loves it here.

‘It’s just like coming home’, he told me.

When I asked him what he meant, he told me that Oxford has changed. Now swamped by immigrants. He’s right of course. A couple of days ago I read an article reporting that nearly all the post-graduate students at Oxford University are foreigners. Which is a direct result of the education policies begun by Margaret Thatcher and continued by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Reduce goverernment spending of education by bumping up the fees for overseas students.

When I told him that I had just moved here from Camden Town, he gave me a friendly smile.

‘Then, you’ll know what I mean.’

I hadn’t the heart to tell him that the Roumanian scumbags were moving in.

After all I feel very much at home here myself. In ethnic terms Dorset is much like the Wolverhampton of my youth before the West Indians arrived. And maybe that’s one reason why it feels like coming home for me too.

But I also feel nostalgic for my twenty-seven years at City University where my days were enlivened by teaching students of every colour from all the major countries of the world.