Destroying Devonshire, the beating heart of European Unity

There was bad news from Axminster in East Devon yesterday, read here. One branch of my East Devon family arrived from France possibly to rectify the inferior tapestries of England as revealed on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Others came apparently with William I. Topsham on the River Exe owes much to its founders fromù the Low Countries. Sir Walter Raleigh presumably owed his extensive world knowledge and superb education to the Black Monks based from nearby Mont St Michel, while before the Romans the County itself is said to have been part of a Kingdom that included Brittany.

Devonshire's landscape and geography makes it unsuitable for rapid transport by land, thus its main communications have always by sea and its close neighbours being considered as foreigners by its English neighbours lying to further east in England. Ottermouth Haven, long since a silted-up but still scenic gem, was once the hub of a vast trading network extending to the Golfe of Saintonge, now similarly largely deserted by the sea, but leaving the memory in the name of nearby Budleigh Salterton.

The EU is a land based collectivist union, insular and shut-off from the world, as is so evident with its present obsession with massively expensive, high-speed rail investments already made redundant by the jet planes streaking through the skies above at twice the speed and at one-tenth the cost.

The enemies of the EU can be defined as those who understand the wealth that can be gained with an open mind given free reign in a system dedicated to the protection and encouragement of individual human rights.

Given the excellence of the Axminster Carpets products and the plunging pound sterling, I have little doubt that this particular East Devon Company will survive to prosper in some form or another long after the EU is another shudder inducing memory such as the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi Germany and Stalin's dictatorship have become today!