Somewhere in the course of  late summer 2018 we realized that our big plans for early in the following year were going to have to be put on hold. Reason: Brexit! We consequently had to make the very difficult decision to pull our most exciting new trip – to Ellie’s home region of Thrace – for some other time in the hopefully not too distant future. After the dust had settled so to speak.

As I write now in the week before Christmas with the government talking of emergency contingencies in the event of ‘No Deal’ it’s not just the uncertainty or even the travel warnings – leaked but hotly denied – which act as unsettling harbingers of what may be yet to come. It is the sheer futility and waste of it all. I am a Jew, Ellie is Greek. To be anything other than Europeans is to confine us – as indeed the Greek Project writ-large – to straight-jacketed national cages where only cultural sterility can be king. Our oxygen, by contrast, flows historically as contemporaneously from the free flow, dialogue and interchange of peoples as of ideas. We hold to that as our European birth-right.

Image: ‘Memory march for the Jews of Thessaloniki, 15 March 2018’. credit, George Fotiadis