Awkward conversations

The way I understand it empires are followed by imperial hangovers. England has numbers of Indians, Pakistanis and Caribbean people, France, I understand, genially hosts North Africans and the Netherlands has various black people from wherever it was that Dutch people sailed to in pursuit of profit before going all liberal and nice. This is just how it is, you jump on a boat, go somewhere and claim it as your own, then you co-opt a percentage of the population to administer your new colony and to stop yourselves getting killed, and then when it all falls to shit, you end up with lots of new people in your homeland.

Of course you can complain about them stealing our jobs and taking our women, but inside you know it is crap, and that all of these different coloured people are the price you are paying for what your country did last night when it got loaded on cheap cotton or spices. Sure, it takes a while to figure all of this out: I remember sitting in a classroom with a map of the British Empire on the wall, just behind a teacher ranting about immigrants, and I didn’t make the connection. But, then, I was 9.

Russians are still struggling to make this connection and they are less than pleased when I help them to do so. They tell me that Russia never had an Empire, and when we get that fixed, and they concede that Imperial Russia, might just have had an empire, they move on to explaining that the Soviet Union was not an empire. That’s a conversation that can last about 8 hours if you’re not careful, and who has 8 hours to spare? If you have a Pole, a Czech, a Chechnyan or a Hungarian in the room the conversation can be much shorter, but the blood loss will increase inversely.

 “Why do they come here?” my Russian friends ask plaintively.

“I can’t imagine.” I reply: “And why do they all seem to be fluent in Russian? I mean it’s almost as though they learnt it at schools established, I don’t know, 40 or 60 years ago.”

 So they come here because we went there, we all know this really, it’s just a question of how many decades it will take us to admit it. They come here to work because the money is here, and one of the main reasons the money is here is because we took it from there way back when.