I PITY THE POOR IMMIGRANT…

Almost two decades ago the British media was awash with anti-migrant stories because Romanians, Bulgarians, Slovaks and Poles were using their European freedom to build new lives in the UK.

Or to send money back to their families in their poverty-ridden homelands.

And the Brits, with their under-the-radar alternative lives in Spain, Portugal and France, their beachside holiday homes and sunny Benidorm breaks, didn’t like it…

On the whole, our neighbours came across the Channel to take the jobs we just didn’t want to do, fruit pickers, healthcare workers and cleaners. And we made them unwelcome.

We decided they were gypsies, tramps and thieves. They weren’t of course. Generally they were good honest people.

But generally we decided we didn’t like them and, on the whole, didn’t make them welcome.

A number of years ago, Andrea and I reversed the process and shipped out to Slovakia to begin a new life. We love it here and we have many friends.

But as Covid put our dreams on hold we began to experience, in a small way, the isolation of living in a foreign country …

I am an immigrant.

When I realised it I was standing in a football crowd-sized collection of the Slovak motley, the well-off, factory workers, doctors and nurses, big police with guns and burly security guards.

The football crowd was there for a common purpose though, to have a ‘freedom’ jab of AstraZeneca vaccine. The police and security guards were there to make sure we all stayed in line.

But despite all the hundreds of people around me, I felt completely alone.

It was like we were back in the 1970s Eastern Bloc when everybody stood in line to get to almost bare shop shelves. The original bread line.

And until a couple of days ago the lack of information from the Slovak government about vaccinations had created a stream of social media disinformation.

Keyboard pundits were making bizarre claims, like there are only 19 vials of vaccine in our green and snowy land of five and a half million people.

Then, without fanfare, emails began to arrive giving us less than two days to fill in forms and get down to the ‘gymnasium’ vaccine point.

There were maybe 500 Slovaks with me in this queue outside an old rundown Russian utility building at the heart of the tiny mountainside city of Poprad,

My wife and business partner, Andrea, and me have worked for Slovakia for fifteen years, mainly remotely from the UK, promoting tourism in newspapers, magazines, radio and the internet.

Business was doing so well that we decided to make our home here almost four years ago.

Since then, Andrea and I have made many friends in Slovakia, they are almost all Slovaks who have a powerful and eloquent command of the English language.

The thing is there are very few English people in this city.

There are a couple of Americans and some Vietnamese, Chinese and many Roma, some indigenous, some from Romania of course and many from other poverty riddled cities and mountains of central and eastern Europe.

But, because our many friends – IT experts, plumbers, electricians, teachers, officer workers, estate agents and workers in alternative medicine – had, over the years, learned to speak English, we lazily became comfortably numb and a bit decadent.

After all, we live in a loft conversion a few minutes walk from the city centre and, before the world’s Covid lock-down, we shlepped around top restaurants and drank to excess in cocktail bars and beer joints.

We drive a big limo with British plates too…

We felt safe inside our bubble of friends and with the arrogance of cosseted immigrants, we never bothered to learn much of the language.

I say this to my eternal shame.

And today – with Andrea waiting for me on a park bench five minutes – I was paying the price, reaping the understandable indifference of my fellow citizens.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/14540358/corrie-fans-backlash-tyrone-affair-ruxandra/

Let me explain something, I’m tall and lanky with long grey hair and I dress, sometimes, like an old biker.

Yes, I stand out in a crowd. I always have done and always will do, I guess. My mother used to harangue me in working-class despair ‘oh why can’t you be nice and ordinary?”

I’ve always been proud of being a bit different.

But right now I feel like the Afro-Carribbeans who were invited to work in our factories and drive our buses.

The late March sun was blisteringly bright, the jagged teeth of the High Tatras mountains were white and snowy clean. The air sharp.

I stand in the queue with everybody else near the grand hangar of the city’s world famous hockey team. I’m gripping my vaccine forms filled in using Google translate and a friend who lives in a yellow and orange tower block nearby.

I am a travel writer, I have worked in zones of war, written lyrically about everywhere from New York to Timbuktu and it’s been brilliant. Andrea, has travelled the world with me for 20 years.

But we are now strangers in a strange land and as I waited I felt vulnerable and afraid. Funny thing for big burly biker look-alike.

I was standing still while the crowd filed past me and went to various positions in the queue, slotting in like dice. I remained stoically where I was, Covid papers scrunched in my palm and my Alpine ski shades steaming up because of my face mask.

Dozens went by, some jostling me and sniggering in my direction. I didn’t know what was wrong, I was just getting a bit angry at all the people pushing ahead of me until I ended up at the very back of the queue.

Then a middle-aged couple stopped beside me and said ‘Time?’

I looked at my watch and said 8.50am. They both began laughing like bronchitic frogs, nodding and elbow-jabbing each other with mirth. It was the husband, a short stocky man of 50-ish in a faded shell suit, who took mercy on me and pointed to my handful of papers. I showed him and he spotted right away that my appointment was 9am – they both made whooshing noises with their mouths and wafted their hands at me: “Front … front!” they said in unison and began laughing good naturedly at me again.

The crowd wasn’t exactly hostile as I regained my ground but watched with a docile sullenness, like cows chewing cud.

But nobody objected as I slid into what I considered to be my rightful place ten rows from the front. After a couple of minutes the battered barrel of a man in his 60s next to me growled something, I apologised and simpered: “Sorreee English.”

He stuffed his hands deeper into the pockets of his worn patched overalls, growled and refused to look in my direction again.

Inside, the armed police eyed me with suspicion. But a second person finally took pity on the poor immigrant.

He was a tight-featured young man, in his mid-twenties, with floppy covid-length hair and severe spectacles. He had obviously spotted my discomfort and waved me over to the table where he was checking vaccine papers. I went across to him, he smiled beneath his clinical mask and said: “I speak English, let me see your papers please.”

He asked me question after question about my health, allergies etc, ticked a few boxes and politely directed me to a solitary wooden chair outside a makeshift canvas cubicle.

I sat there for a few minutes. I nodded to the man opposite me – I was taken by the fact he was still wearing his Christmas jumper with a reindeer on it in March – and he said a mask-muffled: “Dobry Den,” meaning good day.

I replied wrongly: “Dakuiem ...” I knew as it left my lips it was the wrong response and I’d, in fact, just thanked him for speaking to me. He looked confused and turned his eyes to his boot straps.

I stared towards the ceiling as if searching for my immigrant god!

Eventually I was summoned inside the makeshift canvas cubicle. There were three others already inside making social distancing very difficult, we had to slide round each other like doses of mercury. One was a tall middle-aged doctor-ly type, a small middle-aged dumpy medical secretary type who was shuffling papers at a desk in the corner and a tall willowy blonde lady with my ‘jab’ in her hand. She was about half their ages.

She didn’t like me as soon as she laid ‘ears’ on me.

The blonde rolled her eyes so high at my lack of Slovak, that if they had been lasers she would have removed the top of her own skull.

She had a snake-like intensity and I felt like her prey. It was obvious she’d decided it would be great fun to ridicule the white faced immigrant before she skewered him with her skinny glinting needle.

Apparently, I was wasting her time as I tried to hand over my papers to the secretary type – her eyes shot round the inside of her blonde head and back again. When I didn’t sit down quickly enough for her she hissed in barely disguised contempt.

She tapped her foot in agitation as I removed my jacket and rolled up my sleeve … and I watched as she flopped and wobbled her arm like that of a severed puppet at me. But when I did parrot-fashion, thinking that’s what she wanted me to do, she just sneered.

Blondie waited until I wasn’t looking and stabbed me in the arm. And dismissed me.

I never felt a thing.

***

In a small way I had again tasted what it is like to face racism and what it must have felt like to the Slovaks, the Czechs, the Polish and everybody else who ‘invaded’ the UK as a regaled army of fruit pickers and care workers in the 90s.

And as Brexit sails away from British ex-pats like a limping old warship, Europe is revealing itself as an English clone in its distaste for Johnny Foreigner …

They are trying to derail our vaccine roll-out and the Spaniards are clamping down on us by imposing their three month policy.

Before this last lock-down, on our travels down the rolling roads from borderless country to borderless country, Andrea and I were haunted by police in blacked-out BMWs and boy racers in souped-up Skoda Octavias.

And when we got stopped for speeding, the fine almost doubled because we were in our black Bentley look-alike with English number plates.

The four armed-to-the teeth police it took to detain us in a prison of red and white bollards in the fast lane licked their lips at the smell of our cash.

Local cars flashed by at twice the speed we were apparently doing.

But the speed of a corrupt copper’s mind knows no limit eh?

At the Slovenia border, we were made to get out of our car and empty its boot by a pinch-faced sneering spinster border guard with a gun, to show what contraband we were delivering into her country.

Her peevish arrogant gun-toting demands were orchestrated by the full-blown horn section of all the central Europeans who were being stopped from going around their daily business by this inquisitive stick insect in a bullet-proof vest.

But they didn’t have the horn for her, nooo – the cacophony was aimed directly at us.

But she was apoplectic when she found two bars of cannabis chocolate and a bag of non-THC cannabis cookies … the gun itched the sun-parched spider of her hand as she pointed like a sniggering velociraptor at them.

She relented when we showed her the receipt from the official toll-road station souvenir shop in her own country.

So, we were on our way to the sneers and gestures of the locals SHE had held up in the blistering sun.

And why, when we crossed the border in to Croatia, a land desperate to drops its metaphorical skirts and allow the rest of Europe in to its glorious undulating hills and thighs and neatly-trimmed forests and bushes, were we followed by ‘secret police’ in an unmarked van as we went for a lovely day at the seaside?

And why did the taxi driver who took us to dinner confide on the way back home that there were two prices for a trip, a price for locals and a price for British tourists?

But are we being treated any better or worse than we Brits treat the Romanians or the Croats who still come across to the UK looking for a better life?

I think not!

And just maybe we created this atmosphere ourselves … and perhaps we deserve it.

There is a growing climate of anti-tourist sentiment brewing on the continent and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office recently released a list of countries where Britons have been the victims of serious crime.

Yet, there are roughly 2.2 million Eastern European nationals living in the UK, but nobody tells the Polish, Romanian and Lithuanian nationals where they could be in danger.

There were 43,516 knife crime offences in the UK early in 2019, and of course, these crimes were committed, mainly, by our own dispossessed youth, those trapped in tower-blocks that stand sentinel over no-go areas in ALL of our cities.

But in fact all we Johnny Foreigners around Europe want to do is to share what we’ve got, our history, our beauty, our sun our rain our languages, our creativity. We want to become each other – they want the money we can supply for a job well done and we can buy the homes they have abandoned and restore them to their former glory.

“I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours’.

There are approximately 285 thousand British citizens living in Spain, with a further 145 thousand in France and almost 93 thousand in Germany.

But we like modern myths… surveys show Britons think around a quarter of our population are immigrants, when it’s half that, at around 13 per cent.

But it’s not just how many, it’s who these foreigners are that people get wrong.

When asked, people said that immigrants are refugees and asylum seekers yet these are in truth the smallest category of immigrants.

Large proportions think too that immigration increases crime levels, reduces the quality of the NHS and increases unemployment among skilled workers.

This just isn’t true.

The truth is that all we want to do, even if we don’t see it yet, is share our lives, share our cultures, our boots and shoes, walk a mile in each other’s flip-flops, be in each others countries, be friends and distant neighbours.

#SLOVAKS #Polish #Humgarians #gypsies #immigrants #UK #covid #jabs #astrazeneca