I feel the need to grace this latest trip with some context. It looks like it will be the trip that sees me out of the EU whilst in the E!

Article 50 is done, the Queen has given her ‘approval’; the Withdrawal years have started. Mr Johnson has promised it will all be done and dusted by the end of the year (the end of 2020). But what, exactly, will this mean? Will we have everything signed sealed and delivered? Will there be a reaction from our European chums? Will I be allowed back into the UK?

I seem to have spent the entirety (20k+ words so far) of the last eleven months asking stupid questions. I’m still not sure why we wanted out of the EU. I’ve talked to quite a few reasonable people and they all have their frustrations, but no one can tell me why leaving a club full of friends with benefits will make my life any better.

I understand that it may go deeper than the economic arguments, or a nostalgia for the ‘good old days’, it may be more about identity and patriotism, or distrust of foreigners. Brexit may just be a terrible mistake. We’ve made mistakes before.

Europe had a turbulent time of it in the twentieth century. After centuries of belligerence; as one empire replaced another; as religious differences turned the continent upside down; as technological innovations and new ideas about human nature swept aside ancient ways of doing things. We stumbled from one conflict to the next.

Was the 1st World War a mistake? Winston Churchill suggested that Keiser Wilhelm II started the conflagration by mistake – when he threw his cigarette down and went sailing in his big yacht, only to find on his return, ‘… the building impenetrable with smoke.’

I still can’t find a definitive cause for The Great War (1914-1918) that forced my grand father to fight people he had no argument with. The second world war (1939-1945), which took my father to the far east seems a bit more black-and-white; if one sees it as a straightforward fight against fascism (but, of course, it was anything but a straight shot out between good and evil). And, on this 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (27th January 1945), I will never understand how people could do the things they did in that place.

Much has been written about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Was this also a mistake; a horror created out of a confluence of resentment (fed by the consequences of WWI), of ignorance and a search for identity (stoked by propaganda designed to prove an international Jewish conspiracy), an inevitable by-product of what the historian Peter Hall described as ‘the world’s first modern military-industrial state’, the blind actions of a new country whose citizens were famously disciplined and obedient. The Dutch writer Geert Mak (in his wonderful book, In Europe: travels through the twentieth century) suggests that, ‘The roots of … anti-Semitism ran deep’. But he goes on to develop a deeper, more complicated, argument that reflects financial gain, conflicts between neighbours, an absence of a ‘mentality of resistance’, bureaucratic excess and technocrat zeal.

Could we be making a terrible mistake again. The consequences of which will only be apparent to the historians of the future; many of them probably currently benefiting from a sound university education and a place on the Erasmus program? One thing is for certain – I need to do more research, talk to more Europeans, and visit more EU member states.

*Sorry about the terrible pun – Jacques Delors (President of the European Commission 1985-1995) will be spinning!

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At the risk of creating the , less successful, follow up to Bill Bryson’s famous travel book (Neither Here nor There) I had it in mind to just trip over to Brussels (easy), attend one of the upcoming plenary sessions in the main chamber, then trot over a border or two to see out Brexit day in the capital of Poland. Whence I would nip up to the two Baltic state countries I’ve yet to visit. I would achieve all this in a few train journeys and a short, week long, break. Well Europe is a bit bigger than I had remembered, and train timetables aren’t designed with my unique needs in mind.

So, a new plan has emerged and I will be setting off on 28th February still with the hope of catching one of the last two plenary sessions the UK will be involved in. From there I hope to get to Berlin for the actual Brexit moment (23:00 hours 31st January 2020) and thence head to Warsaw, Poland.

Berlin, of course, is central to the European project. Kaiser Wilhelm II had created an imperial city (from 1888 to 1918) to rival London or Paris: unfortunately Winston Churchill had characterised him as a, ‘careless tourist [who] had flung down his burning cigarette in the ante-room of the magazine Europe had become …’. The city has seen some remarkable changes since its days as a small provincial centre of the nineteenth century; from that imperial city to the roaring Berlin of the mid-1920s, through the Nazi Berlin, and the rubble of 1945, through the divided and reconstructed East German capital. It is capital once more; returning to its pre-eminent position on 3rd October 1990.

This fascinating city with its rich, and troubled, recent history, a city that has suffered much, a city that was the front line during the Cold War, as city that is now the powerhouse of the EU. It seemed only fair that I fell out of the Europe here.

I ma looking forward to seeing how this place has grown out of the destruction and suffering of the first half of the twentieth century. I feel inadequate to the task of summing up such a euro monster in the few hundred words I allow myself here. I will report back from this central city in a few days time. And I will continue to research its past for clues as to its future.

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I remember enjoying a lunchtime drink in Buddy Guy’s Blues club, in Chicago, a few years ago. We were spinning our wheels as our Amtrak to New Orleans didn’t leave until later that day. Eddie Taylor Jnr, the son of Jimmy Reed’s guitar player, was playing a great set to an almost empty club. As we were the main audience – there were a few punters sat at the bar, but few were paying attention to the artist on stage – we attracted the attention of Bobby O who had joined Taylor to sing and play harmonica. During a break he wandered over to our table and started to chat (recommending some New Orleans venues and generally filling us in on the scene down South); he was just about to travel to Memphis for the annual Blues Music Awards. His real name was Polish and difficult to pronounce (hence his nickname) and he explained how he was related to Lech Walesa (the Polish statesman, union leader and dissident). Anyway, he came to mind as I was planning my next trip to the EU; I need to go to Poland I thought, what better place was there to see out the UK’s exit than a country that resonated with the raison d’etre of the European project.

Poland plays a central role in European history. Solidarity (lead by Walesa) was the first trade union in any communist country; the historian Timothy Garton-Ash identifies this as, ‘the beginning of the end of communism in Europe’. The first shots of the second world war were fired , on the 1st of September 1939, as a small garrison of Polish soldiers defended an area of the western headland of the Bay of Gdansk. It is also geographically significant as vital trade routes from the bread basket of central Poland gave access to the Baltic ports of the Hanseatic League. So, there are many reasons for identifying this land as central to European history (these are just small illustrative selection).

However, I move around constrained by rail timetables and the usual limits of cash and other resources. I have found it difficult to arrange to be where I want to be on the 28th of January and the Brexit moment of twenty three hundred hours on the 31st of January …

See how I resolve this dilemma, and why it is important, as the story unfolds over the next few weeks.

Do widzenia …

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It’s over. Well, the General Election 2019 is over, but democracy doesn’t end there. Obviously, everyone reading this will have cast their vote; but then what? Do we just sit back and either, complain because our party didn’t get in, or complain because our party did get in! No, we keep reading … we check they are doing what they said they would do in their manifestos, we write to our elected representatives to make our views known to them, we watch and listen (even if it is sometimes difficult to sift the wheat from the media chafe).

It was a remarkable election by any standards. The Conservative government managed to secure a good majority in The House of Commons, thus clearing the way for the Withdrawal Act and our exiting the EU in 2020. As predicted here, the Tories (and Boris Johnson won). But it was a general election marked by Labour’s indecisions over Brexit, by Jeremy Corbyn’s apparently toxic brand and by tactical voting (with the Brexit party and the Lib Dems ensuring the Tories got a clear path back to Downing Street).

In terms of this Blog, I now need to reassess my purpose. Whilst I set out to inform a broad readership of the issues at hand, perhaps hoping for some clarity, the pace has picked up somewhat. The numbers in the Palce of Westminster are now strongly in favour of the government, and the government want to, ‘Get Brexit Done’ – so, it will be done, and done as quickly as they can. The Withdrawal Act got its second reading almost immediately, and was voted through with a thumping majority just four working days after the election. On the same sitting, the House passed an Amendment to the Act revealing the government’s intention to push their advantage as ‘Hard Brexit’ (or even No Deal Brexit) as is possible – removing sections in their deal relating to Workers Rights, Refugee Children, and the sort of compressed timescale that could yet see us crashing out of the EU late this year.

It’s all very frustrating, and very rushed. From my point of view it means going away and thinking about what I want to do now – should I continue to visit all the EU Member States (and to what end)? Should I change the brief and focus on wandering around the world as a disabled traveller? or, should I just give up and read about something else/write something else?

who knows, maybe I can crash another deadline on 31st January 2020.

Stay tuned …

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