Tomorrow Belongs To Me

I've just seen the first half-hour of The Pianist, which seemed to be a rather good film about a pianist in the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War. I taped it a couple of months ago onto one of those video recorders that records onto a hard disk rather than on to tape, but hadn't watched it yet.

Unfortunately, after I saw the Nazis throw a man in a wheelchair out of a first-floor window and then shoot the rest of his family, the adverts came on and, without any apparent instruction from me, my right hand grabbed the remote control, paused the film, stopped it and deleted it. So I won't be watching the rest of it, it appears.

My earliest dreams were about the men in big boots who burst into my house in the middle of the night and dragged us all away: and sometimes about the wolves who chased after me when I jumped off the cart and ran away across the snow.

However, they were dreams, not memories: I was born more than ten years after the Second World War finished, in cosy 1950s England. So the logical explanation is that the dreams were caused by people still talking about the war all around me.

The men in big boots carted off and killed all my relatives in Eastern Europe though, as far as I know.

I suppose if I suggested to the bloke up my street with the big flag and all the little flags that there was any connection, he'd find it deeply offensive. Many people think that patriotism is a good thing: I don't, not in the way that some people mean it. Of course we should look after our country, its people, its environment, its wildlife, and of course we can be proud if we do that - - but that other sort of patriotism, the "my country's better than yours", which is halfway down the slippery slope to "my people are better than yours" - - well, it stinks.