Postcards from the Edge
Please save ailing Eurostar, says Mary Kenny
Mary Kenny
Honestly, I will be genuinely heartbroken if Eurostar – that magical train that plies between London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam – goes bust because of the beastly pandemic.
We can see the danger signs and hear the threats that it might. It has lost 95 per cent of its passengers over the last year – because of restrictions on travel. In 2019, Eurostar was carrying 30,000 travellers a day; in the COVID year, that had dwindled to around 1,500.
How mournful and deserted St Pancras Station seems, as the lively international arrivals and departures have fallen silent. It used to be a hub of life, mingling and interchange, with all the expectation and promise that travel should imply.
I loved that journey – usually starting, for me, at Ashford – ’twixt England and Continental Europe. It evoked almost a pre-war glamour of train travel – classy, streamlined and noiseless, gliding down under the English Channel and then emerging in the Pas-de-calais and all that lies beyond.
Eurostar was fast – two hours 15 minutes from London to Paris, travelling at 185 mph – usually arrived on time and was blissfully comfortable. By far the ‘greenest’ way to travel, it also involved markedly less fuss, queuing and personalsecurity palaver than flight. It was a brilliant feat of engineering, as well as a great example of co-operation between Britain, France, Belgium and Germany, which supplied some of the trains.
I was so looking forward to Eurostar extending its reach to enable train travel to the Mediterranean, Germany and beyond. But now the boss of SNCF, Christophe Fanichet, thinks the company could go bust, and the French and British governments can’t agree on who should cough up a rescue package.
The collapse of Eurostar can’t be allowed to happen. Boris Johnson, who wants to build a tunnel between Britain and Ireland (with a possible stop-over under the Isle Germany is apparently losing its reputation for peerless efficiency. Trains run late, supermarkets are ill managed and the country fell behind in administering the vaccine.
‘How many Germans does it take to vaccinate someone against COVID-19?’ asked the seasoned Berlin correspondent of the Irish Times, Derek Scally. ‘One to administer the jab, another to discuss medical concerns, a third to raise ethical implications, a fourth to flag dataprotection issues, a fifth to send Berlin regular updates by fax and 11 others to stand around voicing non-specific concerns.’
There is a special word for these worrywarts with a ‘can’t-do’ attitude: Bedenkenträger – ‘concern-carriers’.
We all want the chance to visit Germany again – to visit anywhere, really. So we want universal vaccination. But it’s somehow charming that the famed Germanic organisational skills – seen even in football – aren’t always infallible.
In her TV interview last month, Meghan Markle said that although she didn’t research anything about British royalty before joining the family, she knew that the monarchy was an institution over 1,000 years old.
Yet it’s the Grimaldis of Monaco who claim to be the oldest continuous dynasty in Europe; the British had the Interregnum between 1649 and 1660. The Grimaldis were established in 1297 by Francesco Grimaldi, a Genoese nobleman cunningly disguised as a Franciscan monk when he seized the territory. The current Prince of Monaco, Albert II, claims direct descent, which sometimes went through the female line. There is, apparently, also an English branch of the Grimaldis which alleges it has some entitlement to the Principality.
The nice thing about the Grimaldis is that they’ve always been mad about the circus (Princess Stephanie even ran off with an elephant trainer), and Grimaldi the Clown was related to the Monégasques. In the great clown tradition, he had a broken heart – and he took his melancholy to a doctor. The medic said, ‘Cheer up – go and see Grimaldi.’ To which the famous entertainer replied dolefully, ‘I am Grimaldi.’
Princesses have often felt imprisoned within the protocols of palaces. Grace of Monaco, in her time, felt unhappily constrained and Charlene, the present Princess, has sometimes looked distinctly tense under the duress of princessly duty. A Spanish proverb says, ‘ “Take what you like,” says God. “And pay for it.” ’ There’s a cost to every privilege.
I’m fond of an Irish phrase, ‘The old dog for the hard road.’ It’s both inspiring and touching. It relates to working dogs in farming life, where the ‘old dog’ would be given the toughest pathway, because he could always be relied upon, through long training and practice, to do his job.
The expression would sometimes come to the lips of veterans given a tough task and expected to fulfil it without grumbling. ‘Ah, sure, the auld dog for the hard road.’ There was pride, too, in the old dog’s always rising to the occasion. Without complaining or claiming ‘victimhood’!