The Aachen Memorandum by Andrew Roberts

Author:Andrew Roberts [Andrew Roberts]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849544283
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2012-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

Coming up for her thirtieth birthday. Not bad. She didn’t look it. A divorced foreign authoress in her late twenties, who clearly liked him. Interesting. If Cleo didn’t work out …

When he reached Cadogan Street he looked right and spotted her auto. He put the card in the auto boot lock, opened it, shoved the bag inside and shut it quickly. Then he went round to sit in the front passenger seat and buried his face in the electronic A–Z Journey finder, working out the best way to Basingstoke and hoping no passer-by would recognise him. An agonising half-minute later, Gemma got in.

He directed her down Moore Street, back through Lennox Gardens and Ovington Square and left out onto the Brompton Road. They joined the Cromwell Road, passing the Victoria and Albert Anglo-German Friendship Museum and the Natural History Museum on their way out west.

‘Do you want the radio on?’ she asked. The last thing he wanted was for her to hear the news.

‘No, let’s talk.’

In the two hours it took her electric to reach the Basingstoke turnoff they managed to cover just about every subject under the ozone layer. Nothing and nobody was exempt from her attractive, eager, questing brain. Except perhaps sequential thought, for it was something of a grasshopper mind which left a subject the moment she tired of it and hopped onto something more appealing and often unrelated. Horatio soon got over his initial irritation at this.

‘How can you say that you’ve abolished nationalism in the U.S.E. when your soccer matches still turn into pitched battles?’

‘Because in a state where there’s no other possible outlet for patriotic, partisan sentiment – politics, economics, culture and so on – sports competitions become a kind of war by other means. It’s soon going to be dealt with though. Regional teams will no longer be allowed to play each other after 2048, so you won’t get the violence you probably saw on the news after the Northern England v. Grossdeutschland Union Cup final in Copenhagen last month. It’ll all be between local teams next season.’

‘Those people were animals, complete maniacs, those German fans. Did you hear what they were chanting? ‘Britons for ever, ever, ever will be slaves’ and so on. The sheer blatant nationalism of it. Ah can’t tell you, it was horrific!’

‘I feel rather guilty about admitting this, Gemma, but in a sneaking sort of way I have to say I’m rather proud of our own football hooligans. Did you know the Danish Commission had to deploy more riot police at that match than at the height of their recent anti-Aachen riots? Brain-dead those fans might be, but they’re also often incredibly brave. They’ll cheerfully attack forces five or six times their number. They just weren’t going to take all that German provocation lying down. I sometimes wonder whether it is only amongst the working classes that the spirit of aggressive patriotism …’

‘Nationalism, you mean.’

‘Yes, all right, if you like, nationalism, lives on. The social and intellectual elites

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