ONE of the most wonderful and endearing of G. K. Chesterton’s many and varied paradoxes can be found in his 1908 work, Orthodoxy. It has remained a favourite of mine ever since I first stumbled across it in 1988 and, as I recall, the paradox in question concerns the tale of a man who sets out on an adventure from the southern English town of Brighton and, during a storm, is forced to spend two or three days being thrown around in a small boat on the unforgiving waves of the English Channel.

Eventually, as his vessel is run aground, he disembarks and proceeds with great caution, ever-wary of running into a tribe of hostile savages. Before long, he discovers a wonderful temple, an architectural jewel in a strange and foreign land. It is then that he realises that he has merely returned to the very same location from which he had set out originally and that the Indo-Saracenic curves of the mysterious ‘temple’ is itself nothing but the Brighton Pavillion. Consequently, our hero is filled with emotion and suddenly experiences the simultaneous pleasure both of having discovered a ‘foreign’ country and of arriving home safely and in one piece.

On a considerably darker note, however, one can easily imagine a more contemporary version of Chesterton’s tale being repeated by an Englishman of the twenty-first century who, having been abroad for some years, returns to his native land only to find that it has indeed become a foreign country and that his nostalgia and expectation soon dissipate in a pitiful and unexpected torrent of ethnic alienation, cultural confusion and social dislocation. Those of you who have children, nephews, nieces or grandchildren, therefore, and who presently live in relatively European areas, should make it your duty to explain to them – as I did – that they must take a good look around because things will never be the same again.

Sadly, those Europeans living in some of our larger cities and towns have never even had the experience of living within a truly European environment. Not beyond the purely geographical, at least. Value what you have. If you cannot save it, then rebuild it elsewhere.