Postcards from the Edge

Maastricht, home to the treaty that established the European Union, knows how to get on with its neighbours. By Mary Kenny

All the political talk about the Irish ‘backstop’ had the effect of getting me more interested in the geography and psychology of borders.

So I took myself off to Maastricht recently, to savour the Dutch town that is so snugly close to the borders with Belgium and Germany.

You’ll be aware that, for Brexiteers, Maastricht looms ominously: ’twas here that the dastardly Maastricht Treaty of 1992 was confected, turning the European Economic Community into the more imperial European Union – and giving birth to the euro. As academic Kevin O’rourke writes in his excellent A Short History of Brexit, this ‘represented the fundamental deepening of European integration’.

If it hadn’t been for Maastricht, there would have been no Brexit: and we’d all have lived happily ever after!

Actually, Maastricht itself is sweet. Lovely old Dutch houses next to clean, new shopping centres: young and old whizzing about on bicycles; darling little squares and picturesque riverside walks. Nifty and regular buses, an enormous multilingual bookshop housed in an old church and, yes, English as a lingua franca. I heard a German address the bus driver in their common tongue – English.

And, as befits the spirit of Maastricht, there was a complete absence of the Dutch national flag. The one flown over the town hall was that of the EU. As we were in the run-up to Mardi Gras, lots of carnival flags fluttered.

The nearby frontiers are so invisible that it’s hard to spot the point where you cross from Holland into Germany – only the street names change discreetly from ‘straat’ to ‘strasse’. No German national flags seen at Aachen either, where Charlemagne lies within his magnificent cathedral. Crossing to Belgium, I espied just one small Belgian flag – in someone’s back garden. Some stubborn nationalist?

It strikes me that the EU is a little like the Roman – or even Hapsburg – empire. Respect the imperium, put away your petty nationalism and you will live in protected peace, with seamless trading.

National flags aren’t suppressed but, where the borders run into each other, it’s evidently bad form to flash them.

I am the child of elderly parents (like Ferdie Rous, who wrote so movingly about it in April’s Oldie): my father was born in 1877 and my mother in 1902. As a youngster, I thought this a bit weird, but now I feel it gives me an imaginative reach of history over three centuries. (So best of luck, by the way, to any oldies embarking on late parenthood.)

My pa studied at a Jesuit seminary in Beirut in the 1890s and thought the Lebanon stunning – and so tolerant. Christians, Jews and Muslims lived together in harmony (according to his account). Damascus in Syria was dazzling to visit, and the food was fabulous.

Maybe empires can bring peace and harmony. Even the Ottoman Empire.

Ireland is, I believe, the only European state to have introduced gay marriage by a people’s referendum, which was carried by a two-thirds majority.

But not all same-sex marriages are necessarily homosexual: one apparently contented same-sex nuptial union is between Mr Matt Murphy (83) and Mr Michael O’sullivan (59), who are male pals, but not a gay couple. Mattie described himself as, previously, a ‘confirmed old bachelor’, while Michael is a divorcé with three adult children. Recently Michael has been Mattie’s carer. Following the 2016 referendum, they married to avoid inheritance tax.

I imagine many people marry, in later years, for tax-inheritance reasons (not least Sir Ken Dodd, who married Lady Dodd two days before he died last year, saving £11m in tax), and I don’t see why same-sex friends shouldn’t do likewise.

It’s a grand idea for posterity – taking professional photographs of individuals, couples and groups in a community and collecting them together in a book.

Liz Mott, an accomplished professional photographer, has been doing just that for 10 years now for the community in Deal, Kent, where I live.

She has published two books of portraits: the first in 2010 called The Real Deal, and just recently, Another Real Deal, with a foreword by the renowned crime writer Frances Fyfield.

Liz, who was born in West Africa to Anglo-scottish parents, educated in Switzerland and worked in London, found her home in Deal in 2007. She embraced the idea of recording the community with her black-and-white portraits of painters and fishermen, musicians and gardeners, the Russian novelist Zinovy Zinik and the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Michael Boyce. The current portraits are exhibited at the Astor Theatre until April’s end, and Liz is planning another book of the town’s denizens. Every community should have such a recording angel.