4th January 2015

An Unofficial 'Cease-fire'

            The ‘Christmas Day Truce’ between the opposing armies in 1914 has, quite properly, been remembered and celebrated on this centenary year.  Nothing like it, so it is said, was even attempted in World War II.  The reason is, I think, because nowhere were the soldiers of the opposing armies quite so close to each other as they sometimes were in World War I.  However, something rather like that ceasefire was observed between the British prisoners of war in the little German town of Zittau and the local Germans, during the final eighteen months of the Second World War.  Prisoners of war are instructed to divulge only their army number, rank and name to their captors, to maintain their enmity, and to seize any opportunity of escaping.  Number, rank and name was all that was ever required of me. They could always discover our home town by noting the address on our out-going mail!

            It had been easy enough to maintain our enmity to the Italians in the large concentration camp in northern Italy in which I spent my first eighteen months of captivity.  We were half-starved, louse infested and bored out of our minds – frozen in the winter and roasted in the summer.   Transported to Germany on the collapse of Mussolini’s government, I found myself in a small Arbeitskommando (working camp) within the town of Zittau. There were only 30 of us. We were employed, in parties of two to six, on loading and unloading railway wagons, and any other work in the area that required brawn rather than brain.  While working we mixed and (when we had learned some basic German) chatted freely with the German civilians and the Russian and Ukrainian conscripted ‘slave labourers’ who were our companions.  It isn’t easy to maintain enmity with people you meet daily and whom you realize under other circumstances could have been good friends.  Our guards were neither the brutal bullies nor mindless morons of film and fiction. They were remarkably like ourselves, had served on the Eastern Front and had either been wounded or frost bitten to an extent that made them unfit for front line duty.  Their only ambition was to ‘keep their heads down’ and survive the war.  That, as it happened, was our ambition too.  It would have been easy enough to get away.  Usually only an elderly civilian wearing an official armband was ‘supervising us’.  I remember one occasion on which I cut my hand quite badly. I said to our civilian ‘boss’ that I needed to go back to our ‘lager’ (the building in which we lived) to have it washed and bandaged.  He said he couldn’t leave the truck that was being unloaded, so I said that he needn’t bother. I’d find my own way back.  And so I did, walking boldly through the streets of Zittau with no-one raising an eyebrow.  The guard, when I hammered on the door, was just a little surprised to see me unattended but he washed and bandaged my injured hand – and I took the rest of the day ‘off’.

            None of us ever attempted to escape.  Take a look at a map of central Europe and you’ll see how far Zittau is from any then-neutral country.  The Eastern front was quite near as the war came to an end but none of us was sufficiently fool-hardy as to try to get through both the German and the Soviet front lines!  Furthermore we had neither the time, nor the opportunity to plan an escape.  We were usually exhausted when we returned from our day’s work and our guards lived almost ‘on top of us’. I think though that the main reason no-one attempted an escape was the knowledge that, whether or not successful, the lives of those who remained would have been changed for ever.  Our easygoing guards would have been sent to the Eastern Front and replaced by fanatical Nazis. Our every movement would have been observed by an armed guard.  There would have been no more bringing back from work coal for our stoves or potatoes to add to our rations; no more cosy chats with the guards about the stupidity of war!

            We maintained a friendly relationship with the troops stationed in the local barracks.  I once had a very painful rash round my waist.  I thought it was a sweat rash but it was obviously more than that.  A guard and I walked across the town to the ‘Kaserne’ (the barracks). The army medical officer was most interested in my condition and said I was suffering from ‘Girderose’ (I may have spelled it wrongly) which I  learned was shingles. He gave me some vitamin B Tablets and eventually my rash, and the pain departed.  He certainly treated me as effectively as any British Army MO would have. I did no work until the condition had been cleared. 

 

          During the winter of 1944/’45 in the middle of the night, one of our number was accidentally killed by a runaway truck on a railway siding.  I was with him at the time – only a foot or so away, and it was a traumatic experience.  No doubt there was an enquiry about it but I never heard the outcome.  I do know that he was given a full military funeral.  Looking as smart as we could manage, we slow-marched to the cemetery.  A Minister, presumably Lutheran, said a few words as the coffin was lowered into the grave.   We all walked round the grave throwing sprigs of yew that we had been given, onto the coffin.  A firing squad from the local barracks, fired a volley over his grave.  I don’t suppose that that funeral would have given much comfort to his parents and girl-friend but I think that we all found it very moving.  We also had a friendly football match with  German soldiers from the local barracks.  Folded jackets (khaki and field grey) served as goalposts and our biggest worry was of the ball getting kicked into the nearby fast flowing river Moldau.  They won (3 – 1) I think; but then they had a couple of hundred from whom to select their team.  We had just 30, and I wasn’t the only one who was useless at football!

            The most remarkable example of wartime Anglo/German co-operation was with the local branch of the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) whom we all thought of as being fanatical Nazis.  Their office was next door to our ‘lager’.  We had a gramophone and some records, mostly jazz, presumably from the Red Cross.   Hitler banned jazz as being decadent and the young men (mostly teenagers) listened to the sounds from our lager with envy.  Eventually they summoned up the courage to ask our guards and our ‘confidence man’ (official spokesman) if we’d agree to a swap – some of our jazz records for some of their officially approved folk songs and dance music.  To make sure that nothing about this arrangement became known to higher authority, only those who ‘needed to know’ were told of the swap.  I, for instance, knew that there had been some welcome additions to our record library – but it was years later that I learned how it had come about.  I think that we did the better out of the exchange.  I never missed the jazz records but several of the German ones were memorable and enjoyable.  I can remember the tune and much of the words of one of them – it was, I think, ‘top of the pops’ in Germany sometime in the 1930s : Regen Tropfen, die am dein Fenster klopfen, das merke dir, die sind ein Grüss von mir. (raindrops, falling on your window, seem to you to be a greeting from me.)   

            I now have good friends in Zittau and have been to see them on several occasions in recent years. In 2014 they all came to Clacton for my 93^rd birthday celebration.  It was the culmination of a friendship that began before any of them were born!

Impartial BBC?

          I have been – and to some extent still am – a strong supporter of the BBC.  I would hate it to have to depend on the whim of advertisers for its finance.  For over twenty years I wrote a weekly Tendring Topics column for a local newspaper.  Nobody told me what I could and couldn’t write – but I did know that the paper was dependent for its existence on advertisements for new or used cars and homes.  My survival instincts therefore ensured that I thought twice, and then again, before writing too strong a criticism of either estate agents or car salesmen!

            The BBC is pledged to impartiality on controversial topics and in some fields  leans over backwards to ensure that their viewers and listeners are presented with both sides of any argument.  For instance, the world’s leading scientists are all but unanimous on the urgent need to counter climate change (global warming) by phasing out fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) and seeking out and developing sustainable sources of energy.  However, whenever the BBC has an experienced meteorologist on a broadcast programme explaining the importance  and urgency of combating climate change you can bet your life that they’ll find some has-been politician with no knowledge of the subject, or  an ‘expert’ with interests in the oil, gas or coal industries, to give an opposing view.

            How very different is the BBC’s attitude with regard to foreign affairs.   With regard to the situation in the Ukraine for instance, you’d never guess that the overwhelming number of inhabitants of Crimea wanted to be part of Russia.  But I remember before Russia’s ‘annexation’ the difficulty that BBC’s and other reporters had in finding a single Crimean who wished to remain within Ukraine.  The impression is given that the pro-Russian rebels (urged on by Vladimir Putin) began the civil war.  But I remember seeing news shots of the men women and children of eastern Ukraine passively resisting the tanks of the Kiev government, before the fighting started.

            BBC bulletins have ignored the fact that the shelling by the Kiev government forces of the area of the Malayan airliner’s crash delayed the UN inspectors from carrying out their investigation.  Nor have we heard how the relentless shelling of residential areas occupied by the rebels, has destroyed hundreds of homes, killed a great many innocent civilians and caused thousands of eastern Ukrainians to become refugees in Russia.  No wonder elections held by the Kiev government produce comfortable majorities for the supporters of that government – tens of thousands who would have opposed them have been killed or driven from their homes.

            But there – the BBC depends on the government for its licence fee, and the government unquestioningly supports the Kiev Government.  He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Week 12 2012 22..2012

Tendring Topics.........on line

 That ‘Special Relationship’

            Benjamin Disraeli, founder of the modern Conservative Party, was a very shrewd observer of his fellow men and women.  ‘Everybody,’ he once remarked, ‘likes flattery – and with Royalty one should lay it on with a trowel. Today, even in a country like ours with a constitutional monarchy, top politicians have largely taken the place held by royalty in Disraeli’s Victorian age.

            How very heart-warming was the welcome given by the USA to David Cameron and his wife! And how inspiring were the speeches made by the two leaders! Our relationship with the USA, over whose policies we have no influence whatsoever (why should we?) is obviously much more important to our Prime Minister than our membership of the European Union whose policies we can help to shape.

            ‘Britain and the USA have stood together and bled together’, it was said.   Sometimes we certainly have, though not always (in 1810 for instance!) on the same side.   On the basis of lies (Saddam Hussein had ‘weapons of mass destruction that were threatening us …….Iraq was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack on the USA’) Tony Blair, our then Prime Minister, persuaded Parliament to ignore the million-plus British protesters (I’m proud that my sons and their families  were among them) who believed otherwise. Parliament voted for an illegal war that cost Britain millions of pounds and hundreds of lives. 

            The war in Afghanistan was a little more justifiable.  I have no doubt that the Taliban Government was sheltering El Qaida and similar terrorist organisations threatening ‘the West’.  That is why other NATO countries joined in.  However El Qaida has now simply moved its bases across the border into the tribal areas of Pakistan, and to the Yemen and East Africa.

             

            Those were the times when Britain’s special relationship led us to the support of the USA.  There was one occasion on which it didn’t.  Prime Minister Harold Wilson did not send troops to ‘stand and bleed’ beside the American troops in Vietnam fighting the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong rebels, as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair undoubtedly would have.  Does anyone in Britain today regret that the United Kingdom was not part of the USA’s war which ended in defeat and ignominious withdrawal – or the fact that there are no British names on Vietnamese war memorials?

            Incidentally, we were told at the time of the Vietnam War that if the Vietcong won it would be the end of civilisation as we knew it.  Stalinism would prevail over the Far East.  Well – the Vietcong did win.  I really have no idea what kind of government there now is in Vietnam.  I do know though that Vietnam has become a popular holiday destination for western tourists who, despite the lasting damage done by the USA, are made welcome.

            How about the USA’s response in Britain’s hours of need?   They didn’t help in any way when in 1974 Turkey invaded Cyprus, then part of the Commonwealth. In the 1980s they actually organised and took part in the invasion of Grenada, another Commonwealth country in the West Indies; an illegal act of aggression that was condemned by the United Nations.   They didn’t help when Argentina flagrantly invaded the Falklands – an occasion when American intervention really would have made a difference.  The USA’s mining of the approaches to Cuban ports in the furtherance of an illegal blockade, endangered British shipping.  During Britain’s struggle with the IRA, United States law-courts repeatedly refused to extradite IRA terrorists – even those who had been convicted but had escaped – to face British justice.

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18^th May, 1941. My twentieth birthday and, watched by a hungry dog, I am taking a break from sentry duty. 

The UK had been at war for over eighteen months.

France had fallen.  The USA and the USSR were both still neutral.

 Britain and the Commonwealth stood alone against Hitler    

The Americans came into World War II to save to us from defeat?  That really is a myth than needs to be debunked.  The USA, like the Soviet Union, came into the war only when they themselves were attacked.  In 1941 the Japanese attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbour.  The USA declared war on Japan. Hitler, in accordance with Germany’s treaty obligations, immediately declared war on the USA.  We shall never know whether, had Hitler not made that fatal mistake, the USA would have engaged Hitler at that time.  Perhaps, wisely from their point of view, they would have said they would deal with the Japanese threat and leave the UK, the Commonwealth and the Soviet Union to deal with the Nazis.

            Right now, I believe that David Cameron is being softened up to support (or at least not to oppose) the USA and Israel in a ‘pre-emptive’ strike on Iran’s nuclear installations, because of their conviction that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.  I wonder if the intelligence sources that have led to this conviction are the same as those that, just a few years ago, confidently asserted that Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction’.

           

            I fear that, thanks to the flattering star-spangled manner of his reception in the USA, David Cameron may have already pledged his unquestioning support.

Tendring is doubly fortunate!

          The village of St. Osyth, just two or three miles from Clacton-on-Sea is said to be the driest spot in the United Kingdom.  It follows that the Tendring peninsula’s  coastal towns from Harwich to Brightlingsea are the British holiday resorts in which visitors are least likely to have their holiday ruined by rain.

            During the 1970s when I was the Tendring District Council’s Public Relations and Press Officer, I used to make the most of this fact.  Our rainfall, I would say, was comparable with that of the fringes of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert!  When my family and I had moved to Clacton some two decades earlier, the then Council had the holiday publicity slogan ‘Champagne Air – Rainfall rare!’  It was hardly the most brilliant example of the use of the English language, but it made its point.

            Though, as the district’s official Spin Doctor I loved our low rainfall, as an enthusiastic amateur gardener I detested it.  Why did my garden have to be just a couple of miles, as the crow flies, from the driest spot in the United Kingdom!  No wonder that during the summer months I had to spend an hour or so every evening with the hose pipe watering my thirsty runner beans, sweet peas, tomatoes and courgettes.

            Nowadays I cultivate my garden no longer. I was still pleasantly surprised though to discover that the Tendring District – Britain’s driest area – is the one district in our region that isn’t having to endure a hose-pipe ban from the beginning of April; this despite the fact that water level in the region’s reservoirs is even lower than it was during the scorchingly hot and dry summer of 1976.

            The reason so I understand, is that Veolia East, supplier of our water, obtains it from giant natural reservoirs or aquifers deep underground.  Thus they are not so dependent on seasonal rainfall and surface reservoirs as, for instance Anglian Water,   Colchester’s supplier.

            Our supply is still finite.  We should all use water as sparingly as we can – if only to keep our water bills within the household budget!   It does mean though that I’ll be able to continue to enjoy my daily morning shower without twinges of conscience!

Will Private Enterprise ‘Breathe new life’ into the NHS’?

            Those (there must surely be some!) who are looking forward to the Government’s  NHS Reform Bill sweeping away bureaucratic cobwebs and bringing the fresh air of the private enterprise and the market place into the NHS may be interested in this story brought to light by ever-vigilant Private Eye:

            Four years ago the Camden Road Medical Centre, serving 4,700 patients in North London, was acquired by the American health giant United Health who undercut a bid by local GPs by twenty-five percent.  Within a month there were complaints about inferior service and, in particular, about the loss of two locum doctors, one of whom had been based at the practice for eighteen years.

            A year ago, quietly and without consulting or even informing patients, United Health        sold the practice franchise to a company called The Practice plc.  Now The Practice plc has failed to renew its lease on the premises that have been used by doctors for almost a century.  The Centre is closing, staff will lose their jobs and the 4,700 patients will have to find other GPs – miles away!

            It must never be forgotten that privately owned businesses are run primarily to make money for the shareholders – not for the benefit of those it claims to ‘serve’.

Salute to Slovenia!

          Since last November, when I changed the means by which I gain access to my weekly blog to Google, I have been able to keep a check on how many people view it and the countries in which it is most popular.  For some time the greatest number were in India – the United Kingdom coming a poor second!  In the New Year my Indian viewers almost disappeared but there has been a welcome increase in viewers from Britain, the USA, Germany and Russia.

            Some smaller and/or less populous countries came and went – Sri Lanka, Israel, Belgium, Australia, United Arab Emirates and so on.  One small country though remained constant.  I haven’t many Slovenian viewers – usually between six and twelve – but then it is a small country, and those viewers are loyal.  There has never, so far, been a day on which I have checked my ‘readership’ and found none at all from that small but beautiful country.

And beautiful it certainly is.  When my wife Heather and I toured what was then a united Jugoslavia in 1980 in our motor-caravan our first, and very happy, experience was of crossing the frontier from Austria into Slovenia and driving to the shores of Lake Bled where we parked our van and spent our first night .  We spent the last day and night of our tour there too.  It was there that I first tasted Slivovice!

Many years later, after Slovenia had gained its independence, my elder son, daughter in law and younger grandson Nick also visited – in the winter – and found it, and its capital Ljubljana, to be a true winter wonderland.  Nick incidentally, became an expert on European travel and is currently Acting Executive Director of the European Travel Commission, encouraging folk from all over the world to spend their holidays in beautiful and historic Europe (see, www.visiteurope.com)

Our motor-caravan at sunset in an olive grove

            So, may I say thank you to my Slovenian viewers.  I very much hope that you will continue to find my blog interesting.  I am not sure whether or not this picture, of sunset in a lakeside olive grove, was taken in Slovenia. Then there were no national boundaries within Jugoslavia.   If not in Slovenia it was certainly taken not far away and it typifies the memories that I have of a very happy holiday; memories that are specially precious because they are of the last overseas holiday that my wife and I were to enjoy together.    

Week 6 2012 9.2.2012

Tendring Topics........on line

 ‘Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you’

            St. Matthew records in his Gospel that Jesus declared that single commandment summed up the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament.  I hope that I am not being too heretical in saying that I wish he had gone on to state the corollary, ‘Do not do anything to other people that you would hate them to do to you’.  Perhaps Jesus did say that too but it seemed too obvious to need recording.   It clearly needed to be said though, because Christians have flagrantly ignored it through the centuries.

            It could be argued that do not is even more important than the positive do. The things we like vary widely.  George Bernard Shaw wrote in his Maxims for Revolutionaries that we should not do to others what we would like for ourselves. Their tastes may be different.  I think though, that even Shaw would agree that while we may like many different things, there are dislikes that are shared by us all.  I am quite sure that every single one of us would hate the idea of being tortured or burnt to death.  We all would hate to be brought to a violent death, to be enslaved, starved, rendered homeless, or separated from those we love.

            Yet, as Lord Byron pointed out; ‘Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded that all the apostles would have done as they did’ and Thomas Hardy wrote in his poem Christmas 1924 ‘After two thousand years of mass, we’ve got as far as poison gas’.

            These thoughts came to me when I heard Barak Obama, an international leader whom I had greatly admired, defending the use of unmanned drones to find and kill in Pakistan individuals whom the CIA has decided are members of Al Quaida or some other similar terrorist organisation.   The killing of these people, he said, was justified because they were a threat to the people of the USA.  They were carefully targeted and ‘very few’ innocent civilians were accidentally killed at the same time!

            It isn’t so very long ago that convicted, not just suspected, IRA murderers could find sanctuary from British justice in the USA.  American courts refused to return them to Britain for trial and/or punishment. They were a threat to the people of the United Kingdom. What, I wonder, would have been the American reaction had British MI5 agents in the USA sought them out and assassinated them – even if they managed to do so without harming a single innocent civilian?

            Assassination, without even the semblance of a trial, is abhorrent whether carried out by Al Quaida, by Mossad, the CIA or MI5.  In human society there can be no licence to kill

Do not do to other people what you would hate being done to yourself!

 ‘In the bleak midwinter’

  

The sudden change in the weather from milder-than-normal to sub-arctic has come as an unpleasant surprise.  Old people like me are warned to wrap up well and to keep at least one room in our homes warm at all times. I am very sorry for the increasing number of people, not necessarily all old, who have to decide whether to heat or eat.  It was a choice that the unseasonably warm autumn and early winter had led us all to imagine no-one would have to make this winter.

            My mind goes back to cold winters of the past, to the winter of 1962/1963 when the sea froze over.  I was a Public Health Inspector at the time and took these two photographs near Clacton Pier.  It was a bitter winter and a cold spring.  I remember the cemetery staff complaining that when they dug graves, the frost followed them down, freezing the soil beneath their feet as they worked!

We were dressed for the Libyan Winter! No 4 Gun of B Troop, 231^st Medium Battery RA at Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass) on the Egyptian Libyan border, early January 1942.  I am the one on the right – with a woolly hat!

           

                During World War II I spent one winter in the Egyptian/Libyan frontier region, one in a PoW Camp in northern Italy and two in a small working camp (Arbeitskommando) in Germany.  In North Africa it could be bitterly cold when the north wind blew in from the sea.  Some South African troops experienced snow for the first time – a light dusting over the surface of the desert that disappeared as the sun rose.

            The winter in a prison camp in Italy is one that I would prefer to forget.  We were housed in unheated jerry-built huts, wearing totally inadequate Italian army uniforms (most of us had been wearing just shorts and shirt when captured) in which we tried to sleep, pulling our overcoats and two thin blankets over our heads to try to conserve what little warmth we had.  We were permanently hungry, louse infested and bored out of our minds.  Every day in winter we shivered on parade while Italian guards counted us – often miscounting and having to start again from the beginning.  As a result I can still count in Italian uno, due, tre, quarto, cinque and so on as quickly as I can count in English!  There were between 2,000 and 3,000 of us in the camp and deaths from cold-and-starvation related conditions were a daily occurrence.                                                                             

Zittau Rathaus (Town Hall).

One of my more back-aching jobs was to carry filled sandbags to the roof of the town hall as a fire precaution!

My memories of the two winters in Zittau, eastern Germany are far less negative.  We were wearing British army uniform and greatcoats (presumably supplied by the Red Cross) as our louse-infested Italian uniforms had been burnt on arrival.  I was in a small working ‘camp’ (Arbeitskommando) of just 30 British PoWs.  Our living quarters were palatial compared with those in Italy.  We had a separate living room and dormitory with double glazed (as well as barred!) windows.  There was a tortoise stove in the bedroom and a solid fuel cooker in the living room.   We were very often unloading coal trucks on the local railway sidings – so we were never short of fuel, even if it was only inferior lignite (‘brown coal’) briquettes! We were never cold.  Working every day (with just one ‘rest day’ in three weeks) we had no time to be bored and, from mid-winter 1944/1945 we could hear the gradually increasing thunder of artillery fire as the Soviet Army advanced inexorably across Poland and into Germany, and a constant stream of refugees from the battle front trudged wearily westward through the snow-covered streets of Zittau.   Our time of captivity was hastening to an end.

           

A New Danish Invasion!

            If any one had told me a year ago that I would get hooked on a tv serial in a foreign language about high level politics in a foreign country, with dialogue subtitled in English as in the silent movies, I would have thought that they were crazy.  Goodness knows I find news reports  of English party-political point scoring tedious enough! I can though at least understand what it is all about. Political manoeuvres in a foreign land and in a foreign language would surely be much worse.

            Yet I have just watched the tenth and final hour-long episode of Borgen, a Danish political drama on BBC 4 tv, with real regret that it had come to an end.  It was the third Danish tv drama with English-subtitles that BBC 4 had given us.  The first two were detective thrillers, both with the unpromising title of The Killing, featuring the unsmiling but strangely magnetic police detective Sarah Lundt.  I thought that the first, in which we were taken into the ‘real life’ of the family of the teenage murder victim, was the better of the two. I know that they were ‘only actors’ but it was difficult to believe that the grief, sorrow and anger of her parents and younger brothers were not real!  Surprisingly, the strong intertwined sub-plot, about the election of Copenhagen’s Mayor, was equally gripping.

            Borgen was quite different.  It followed the fortunes of Birgitte Christensen, fortyish, married, mother of two, and leader of one of Denmark’s political parties. Very likeable, she was clearly highly principled – sacking her Public Relations Consultant for unfairly discrediting the then Prime Minister, one of her political opponents. 

            As a result of political manoeuvring she found herself Prime Minister of a coalition government of a number of political parties.  At first we saw her clearly ‘on the side of the angels’.  She stopped the use of a Greenland air base by United States planes engaged in the ‘rendition’ of political prisoners, thereby  incurring the wrath of the White House and the cancellation  of a Presidential visit to Denmark.   She called the bluff of a Danish millionaire newspaper magnate who threatened to leave the country if she persisted with legislation promoting women's rights.   She secured a contract to supply wind turbines to a former Soviet Republic with an appalling human rights record, outwitting the country’s president who would have liked to have made the deal conditional on the extradition of a dissident refugee who had fled to Denmark.

            Then Birgitta’s halo began to slip. She allowed the use of a recorded remark made by a former friend many years earlier at a drunken party, to justify the bugging by the Danish Secret Service of the office of the political party which that former friend now led. Her friend’s reputation and political career were shattered.  To help cover up the Defence Minister’s corrupt acceptance of gifts and hospitality in connection with the purchase of fighter aircraft, Birgitta persuaded her husband to refuse a very satisfying and lucrative job that he had been offered.   She sacrificed the cabinet post of a trusted colleague and long-standing friend and adviser to keep the coalition government intact – and she agreed to a divorce and abandoned her marriage in the pursuit of her political ambition.  At the end of the final episode we saw her after she had made on tv the most eloquent speech of her career, extolling Danish nationalism and earning the applause even of her victims!   She was Denmark’s undisputed political leader – but she had lost everything that had made her the likeable, principled political leader that she once had been.   'What shall it profit a man (or woman) to gain the whole world and lose his/her soul?'

            I am looking forward to the next tv offering from the land of the Vikings!

             

           

           

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