People in the UK have become quite exercised this week with issues of immigration, legal or illegal, which is worth looking at in the cold light of a laptop's screen over a flat white and a flat biscuit.
I can't recall whether it was travel writer Wilfred Thesiger or King Charles' favourite explorer Laurens Van der Post who wrote it, but I'm quite sure it was the legendary Colin Hilton who read it ~ the suggestion that the car and aeroplane were what had destroyed diversity in the world from one country to another.
Put that into context: Thesiger arrived once at a village in some or other desert-ified place and seeing his Land Rover the locals brought hay (or the equivalent) to feed it with, not having seen one before. Before you question whether that were possible in the twentieth century, consider that not that long prior when horses were first seen in the Americas the locals figured horse and man were together a species of human being... which would have delighted the ancient Greeks, who did the same to goats and bulls, albeit more often in stone.
Migration is therefore simply a networking issue to which we've to add smartphones as the cherry on the icing when it comes to lubricating the process. The lifestyle we most enjoy ~ and wish to continue enjoying ~ is thus the one that most persuades and enables people in moving vast distances from A to B.
The car, for instance, is King and governments like our own do all in their power to ensure that life is practically impossible without one; an effort replicated throughout the West.
The aeroplane is effectively subsidised and operates as a tax-free Nirvana in which a population is moved seamlessly in pursuit of work, leisure, friends and relatives. It's the Queen, of buckets and Spades.
The phone, which our lives revolve around, ensures that the comparative paradise the UK is can be communicated elsewhere in order that ever-expanding networks on the ground and in the air can be exploited to the greatest extent: the Jack, of all trades.
Given this, in view of the fact we're voluntarily fuelling the process, what politicians of any colour are able to do is likely to be as effective as King Canute in claiming to be able to defeat the tide: running around the room shouting 'Smash the gangs!' all they're really missing are the party-hats.
Here on the blog we're interested in the physical world moreso than the human, and the whole thing is fascinating only so far as its parallels with processes of osmosis or diffusion.
Isn't it, Gromit?
My friend who arrived via inflatable joined a weekend in the Peak District and seeing video of me at a parkrun or a drunken BBQ in the summer sun, who wouldn't want the chance to share a sausage with an influencer?
