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Reduced to a Third-Country National

On identity, borders, and the cost of leaving Europe

I’m proudly British. Married twice to a French woman, both sadly deceased. Bilingual, dual-nationality children, and one British-Thai trilingual daughter who I hope will soon gain French citizenship.

I live in France. I love France. And I believe deeply in the idea of Europe as a shared civic space, not a cluster of anxious little fortresses eyeing one another across borders. Different languages, cultures and histories, yes. But bound by cooperation, freedom of movement, and a collective determination not to repeat the worst catastrophes of the 20th century.

The EU, for all its flaws, is not about erasing identity. It is about enlarging it.

This is our flag too 🇪🇺

I did not “wake up” to Europe recently. I have lived in France for decades. A cross-border, multicultural life. Work, family, languages. I never bothered applying for French nationality. Having voted in the 1975 referendum, which produced a roughly 67–33 landslide in favour of Europe, I assumed the question was settled once and for all. Not for a news cycle. Not for a generation. Settled. Then Brexit proved that assumption fatally naïve. Overnight, it was taken away by a whisker-thin ‘advisory’ referendum majority of those who voted, overturning a far larger, long-standing mandate. A campaign financed by a self-interested wealthy elite, driven by lies, nostalgia, a wilful ignorance of how modern Europe actually functions, and later exposed as a political sewer in which former UKIP MEP and later Brexit Party and Reform UK figure Nathan Gill was convicted of accepting pro-Russian money.

As a British citizen in France today, I can stay here indefinitely with a residence permit. But step across another EU border and I become a third-country national. Timed. Limited. Herded. Counted. Reduced. The freedom of movement I exercised for most of my adult life now exists only on paper, in my well-worn, soon-to-expire, burgundy passport.

That is not sovereignty. It is deliberate self-harm dressed up as pride.

So I am applying for French citizenship. Not to abandon Britain, but to reclaim the European identity that was stripped away against my will.

Rejoining will not be quick. It will not be easy. But the damage Brexit has done is structural, personal and generational, and pretending otherwise helps no one. The consequences of leaving are not going away either.

Europe was never the problem.

Walking away was.

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Sanctioned Stupidity

Today’s attack at Bondi Beach was, according to early reports, aimed at a Hanukkah celebration.

If that is confirmed, it will be yet another example of something humanity has failed to confront honestly. Religion has repeatedly given stupid people an excuse to commit unspeakable atrocities against their fellow humans.

Not because faith uniquely creates violence, but because it can sanctify it. It allows cruelty to be reframed as virtue, and murder as duty.

Swap God or Allah for a leader, a flag, or a slogan, and cult-of-the-personality politics does exactly the same thing. It licenses hatred and intolerance by outsourcing moral judgement. The mechanism is identical. So is the stupidity.

As Richard Dawkins wrote: “Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness”.

And, depressingly current despite being written centuries ago, Voltaire observed: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.

Bondi is not a symbol. It is a beach. Families, swimmers, cafés, celebrations. When ordinary places and innocent civilians become targets, the problem is not misunderstanding or grievance. It is belief taken seriously enough to suspend reason.

Humanity keeps doing this. And then acts surprised.

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A Tale of Two Khao Takiabs

Escape from Eight Hours of Techno Torture, to Sanctuary at the Macaca Beach Bar

We came to Khao Takiab for a peaceful night by the sea. Softly lapping waves reflecting the full moon, a light breeze, a swim in warm water. Instead, we found ourselves with a front-row seat at a deafening eight-hour Full Moon techno slash EDM party we had not planned on watching from our balcony.

From our fourteenth-floor room the bass reached parts of me usually only accessible via MRI or possibly, Heineken. The sliding glass doors and half the room’s contents vibrated ominously. The hotel had thoughtfully listed the prices of breakable items, should the evening’s physics experiment go wrong: 5000 baht for the balcony doors, 5000 for the shower partition, 3000 for the mirrors. A sort of DIY earthquake insurance.

The entire building shook to the pounding bass like a washing machine on its final spin cycle. Sleep was not a concept with any practical meaning.

It turns out the Full Moon electronic music scene in Hua Hin is alive, well, and apparently trying to contact the International Space Station. I had never heard of EDM before last night either. Had I not googled it, I would have guessed it stood for Eardrum Destruction Mode. Or possibly Everyone’s Deaf by Morning.

I posted a 30-second clip to YouTube, only for it to be instantly blocked for copyright. Imagine claiming ownership of that racket. Bold.

Eventually we made a strategic retreat, wandering around the Khao Takiab headland, guided by nothing more scientific than the absence of tremors in the ground and the assumption that even EDM could not penetrate several million tons of rock. And there, on the quiet side, we stepped straight into a parallel universe.

⸻

Macaca Beach Bar: The Anti-Techno Sanctuary

Gone were the seismic shockwaves. Gone were the DJs attempting to collapse the ionosphere.

Instead: calm.

Macaca Beach Bar was everything the party was not. Cheerful, gentle, human.

A singer with warm, bluesy, jazz-soul vocals in an Amy-meets-Withers style – soft, smoky, effortlessly relaxed.

Cocktails mixed with pride.

Free salad and BBQ chicken because… why not.

People who value tranquillity over decibel warfare.

It was the sort of place that restores your sanity within minutes. Proof that much of humanity still remains unconnected, conversational, and perfectly capable of not shouting.

On the other side of the headland, EDM was still competing with Voyager 1 to become the first audio signal detected by extraterrestrial life. Yes, I am aware sound does not travel in space. However, EDM appears to be a new scientific phenomenon that operates on quantum principles. It can be detected simultaneously in every corner of the known universe and possibly in one or two unknown ones.

Amazing what a short walk can do for your faith in humanity… and your will to live.

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From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

The early morning songtaew was peaceful. A lay ascetic sat opposite me, quiet, composed, radiating the sort of calm that makes everyone else behave for once. No drama. No noise. No need to pretend the world is listening (as in the earlier blog).

Fast-forward to the return journey, where tranquillity died a swift death.

In his place: a drunk American with the volume setting of a foghorn and the self-awareness of a parking bollard. He asked if we wanted him to sing, but didn’t pause long enough to hear the universal internal “no”.

His opening act was Rolling in the Deep.
His excuse? Five weeks ago an AI app had allegedly told him he had “a great voice for Adele”.

The AI should be prosecuted.

The bus was packed with Thais, Scandinavians, Germans, a French couple and one Brit, yet he assumed all would understand his rapid-fire drunk American monologue — delivered at full volume because, as we know, when people don’t understand you, the correct solution is to shout.

He powered on regardless, offering unsolicited compliments to a young Thai girl and proudly informing a German that he had “actually been to Germany”, as if announcing a major expedition to a developing nation.

Then he threatened an encore — I See Red, unintentionally appropriate.

At that point I pressed the red buzzer and abandoned ship. Walking home was easier than staying for verse two.

Sunrise with a gentle ascetic…
Sunset with unsolicited American karaoke.

A neat illustration of Thailand’s ability to present the entire human spectrum in under twelve hours.

“Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed by the facts“.

Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936) American humourist and journalist. Chicago Tribune on 26 April 1914, under the title “Mr. Dooley on Alcohol”.

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A Moment of Stillness on a Moving Road

A man climbed onto the baht bus today who could have walked straight out of the early chapters of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha – the years when Siddhartha leaves his comfortable life with his father, the Brahmin, to join the Samanas[1], the wandering ascetics who strip existence down to hunger, silence, and sheer will. This was long before the temptations, glitter and intoxications of town life[2], long before his encounter with the Buddha[3], long before he discovers that the hardest part of a spiritual journey often comes after the ideals have fallen away.

He wasn’t a monk. His pale-purple robes were immaculate – crisp, freshly laundered, and carefully kept. Beneath them, a bright white undershirt lay perfectly clean, almost formal in its simplicity. It was only the small purple bag resting across his lap that showed the marks of time: faded, stained, and frayed, its printed lettering from an old temple ceremony half-worn away.
A topknot pinned in place, script tattoos climbing his neck and hands, and a long staff capped at both ends with crystal bulbs completed the picture – not of neglect, but of someone who presents the life he has chosen with deliberate discipline.

Most tourists would have seen only an eccentric figure sharing their ride. But for me, something in him struck a deeper chord.

I first read Siddhartha when I was young, when the idea of abandoning everything – possessions, ambitions, expectations – carried a certain romantic allure. But the book has only grown heavier with age. Hesse understood the full arc: Siddhartha’s shift from punishing asceticism to its opposite extreme – the seductions of town life, comfort, status, and the slow drift into sensuality… and then the moment of self-recognition, sharp enough to cut through every illusion he had gathered. The sudden departure. The collapse. And afterwards, the quieter journey: the ferryman[4], the slow apprenticeship to the river[5], the failed attempts at fatherhood, the inconsolable despair when his son ran away[6], and eventually reconciliation with himself once all the noise had fallen away. Enlightenment.

And perhaps what stayed with me most, as I watched the man on the bus, was the reminder that we never truly stop growing or searching, even when the world assumes we have already arrived. Some paths bend back unexpectedly, some separate, some rejoin later in ways we could never have predicted – and sometimes the agonising distance between people is simply another part of the journey rather than the end of it[7].

The man sat perfectly still, the staff resting across his knees, utterly self-contained. There was no performance in him, no desire to be noticed – just an interior steadiness, as if whatever road he had walked before this one and the road beneath us now shared the same quiet momentum.

The driver didn’t ask him for his fare. Here, that is considered making merit: a small gesture toward someone regarded as living a spiritual life.

But for me, it was also a moment of recognition: a small reminder, arriving without announcement on a calm Hua Hin morning, of the long looping path between confusion and clarity that most of us travel more than once in a lifetime – whether in forests, in cities, or on a rattling baht bus heading down the coast toward the next stop.

Footnotes

[1] Samanas
The wandering Indian ascetics Siddhartha joins at the beginning of the novel. They practise extreme renunciation, fasting, and meditation.

[2] Town life” period
Siddhartha becomes wealthy and successful, indulging in worldly pleasures. He eventually realises he has lost himself.

[3] Encounter with the Buddha
Siddhartha meets the Buddha but chooses not to join his monastic order, believing he must find truth alone.

[4] The ferryman
A humble man who becomes Siddhartha’s quiet teacher, showing him how to listen and observe without judgement.

[5] The river
The central symbol of the novel – representing balance, unity, impermanence, and the flow of life.

[6] His son
Siddhartha’s attempt to raise his newly-discovered, angry and resentful son ends painfully, deepening his understanding of attachment and loss.

[7] Paths diverging and returning
A gentle echo of the novel’s theme that relationships and lives are not linear – separation does not always mean ending.

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Message In A Bottle We Refuse To Read

Plastic and fishing debris washed onto a beach in Thailand

From Innocence to Decay

As a child in the 1960s, I remember British beaches in a way that now feels almost unreal. Bridlington, Walton-on-the-Naze, Leigh-on-Sea… long stretches of sand and shingle where the most exotic intrusion was the occasional washed-up jellyfish or a stray wrapper blowing in from someone’s picnic. The shoreline was a place of innocence; you ran towards the sea, never pausing to wonder what was floating in it. Even in towns with busy estuaries, the worst you might step on was a shard of old bottle glass worn smooth by years of erosion, or a length of frayed rope.

A Tide of Poison

Half a century later, you would struggle to find a coastline anywhere that still resembles that memory. Storms, monsoon swells and shifting currents have become conveyor belts for the artefacts of our excess. Every tide reveals what we have been discarding for decades: plastic bottles, drink cartons, fishing line, food packaging, polystyrene, abandoned nets, and microplastics embedded in the sand like malignant grains. Billions of fragments – light enough to drift for years, toxic enough to outlive us all – spreading across the planet like a tide of poison that never recedes.

Storm tide plastic pollution

A Dystopian Message In A Bottle

What would once have shocked now barely registers. Children move through the debris as if it belongs. Tourists step over the washed-up rubbish as if it were driftwood. Local authorities rake the top layer of sand to preserve the illusion of order. We have adapted to filth without realising how completely it has colonised the edges of our lives. Even the seabirds pick through the same debris now, not mistaking it for food but simply finding it everywhere they turn. What should be sand and sea has been replaced by this new, synthetic terrain.

“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans” – Jacques Cousteau

Scientists estimate that up to fourteen million tonnes of plastic enter the oceans each year. Microplastics now fall in Arctic snow, sit in the sediment of the Mariana Trench, and circulate inside human bloodstreams. They have colonised the biosphere more thoroughly than we ever colonised continents. It is not a metaphor. It is the world as it is.

Back then the tide brought shells and seaweed. Now it returns our rubbish like a message in a bottle, though one we still refuse to read.

tangled plastic at the waterline

Slow Decline

Because this is what collapse looks like. Not sirens, not riots, not dramatic tipping-points. Just a slow, grinding acceptance of ugliness. A civilisation adjusting to decay in real time, as long as the Wi-Fi still works.

Nature attempts to compost what it can: palm debris, rotting vegetation, the brittle remains of coconuts. But mixed through it all is the stuff it cannot break down. A permanent record of our carelessness, washed ashore with every tide.

The dystopia is not in the future. It is already here. It arrived quietly, wave by wave, bottle by bottle, shrug by shrug.

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself” – Rachel Carson

Civilisations rarely fall in a single dramatic moment. More often they dissolve under the combined weight of their own ignorance, pride and, in the 21st century, detritus. We have microplastics in our seas, soils, skies and blood. We build floating garbage islands large enough to be seen from satellites. Our children weave between discarded drink cartons, broken flip-flops and syringes.

“The ocean is the heart of the planet. If the oceans die, so do we” – David Attenborough

One less plastic bag on the beach, billions to go

Sisyphus, Beach Version

And then there is the scene on the beach in the photos: one lone man, bent over like an aging Sisyphus, stuffing rubbish into an old dog-food sack. Earnest, futile, resigned – an act of defiance against a world that long ago stopped listening. Even caring. A tiny gesture in a collapsing system. Not enough to change anything, but just enough to show that someone, somewhere, is still paying attention.

A small protest against indifference, against entropy, against the slow drowning of a species in its own debris.

UPDATE – latest news, 24/11/2025

A 100 million year old survivor, tricked by a tourist wristband. Welcome to the Anthropocene.

Another day, another tourist offering the local wildlife a taste of our civilisation. Plastic, brightly coloured, and guaranteed to outlive the turtle by several centuries.

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A Night On Borrowed Time

I seem to have checked myself into what can only be described as a vintage survival capsule. One of Hua Hin’s old stilted piers, the sort the municipality has been dismantling for “encroaching on public land” since roughly the Late Bronze Age. Some have already gone. This one is still here through sheer bloody-mindedness and salt deposits.

I found it during an insomniac dawn wander, following the roar of the surf like a moth with questionable judgement. Suddenly I was in the old fishing-pier quarter, staring at a wooden structure clinging to the coastline as if no one had told it the century had changed. Naturally, I booked a room.

The deal: 550 baht for a fan (the November sea breeze does most of the work anyway), or 850 baht for aircon if you enjoy chilling the Gulf of Thailand at your own expense.

The room itself is painted a cheery sky-blue, presumably so you do not notice when the actual sky comes in through the rattling windows. The waves thunder directly beneath the floorboards with all the subtlety of a bowling alley. But honestly, this is precisely the charm. Old Hua Hin, before glossy resorts and rooftop cocktails. Fishing boats on the sand. Salt-bleached timber. And the constant sense that the sea would quite like its living room back.

Clip one: filmed inside the room while hoping not to be adopted by Poseidon.

Still, sleeping above the water in a place that may not exist much longer feels like a novelty worth embracing. Preferably while sober.

Postscript: the morning after.

The whole place sways with each crashing wave, like a Clacton beach hut in a north-easterly gale quietly questioning its life choices.

I cannot pretend I slept. I had, with flawless timing, chosen the night Hua Hin was being slapped about by the remnants of a tropical storm.

In fact, while I was lying there waiting for the floorboards’ final monologue, the city raised red flags and banned swimming altogether:

🚩 “Hua Hin bans swimming” … as the sea tries to climb onto the land
Waves of two to three metres, a beefed-up northeast monsoon, and a wind surge marching across the South… basically everything you do not want when your bedroom is held up by wooden legs older than most democracies.

Officials installed red flags along the main beach from the Chao Mae Tubtim shrine to Khao Takiab and told everyone to stay out of the water until further notice. Sensible, though I would have appreciated a similar notice pinned to my stilted room.

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How to Tell If You’re Caught in the Dunning-Kruger Trap

(and why we all are, sometimes)

What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt” (Bertrand Russell)

We like to imagine stupidity as something that happens to other people – the loud ones, the red-faced pub ranters, the ones convinced that climate change is a hoax and that immigrants are personally responsible for NHS waiting times. But the uncomfortable truth is that the Dunning–Kruger effect isn’t a political problem or a class problem. It’s a human one.

It’s what happens when confidence outpaces competence – when ignorance dresses up as certainty and decides expertise is just elitism by another name. And, inconveniently, we’re all prone to it. Every last one of us.

Signs you might be stuck in the trap

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871)

The trap is simple: the less you know about a subject, the less aware you are of what you don’t know. The gaps in your understanding are invisible from the inside, so you feel informed, even expert. Meanwhile, genuine expertise often breeds caution and hesitation, because the more you learn, the more complexity you see. Knowledge expands your horizon; ignorance shrinks it until you think you’ve reached the edge of the world.

So how do you spot when you’ve wandered into Dunning–Kruger territory yourself?

Start with the inner monologue. When you find yourself absolutely certain about something you’ve never studied, never tested, and never risked being wrong about – pause and reflect. Because that’s the faint hum of Dunning–Kruger in the wiring.

Then listen for reinforcement. Are you seeking information that challenges you, or just nods in your direction? Do you read people who know more than you, or only those who confirm that you’re already right? Certainty without challenge isn’t wisdom. It’s insulation.

How to escape the trap

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so” (Mark Twain)

There are a few ways out of the trap, though none especially comfortable:

– Seek friction. Talk to people who disagree intelligently. It’s the intellectual equivalent of stretching.

– Read and study. Stay curious. Because curiosity and humility share a root system. Starve one and the other dies.

– Revisit your opinions. If something you said a year ago doesn’t embarrass you at least a little, you probably haven’t learned much since.

Why it matters in today’s world

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd” (Voltaire)

Most of us oscillate between knowing too little and thinking we know too much. It’s the human condition. But the moment we start to believe we’re immune – that the fools are always someone else – we’ve ourselves fallen into the trap.

And of course, even humility has its own vanity. We can end up boasting about our doubt, congratulating ourselves for being sceptical while quietly admiring the reflection. Uncertainty isn’t the destination – it’s the method. The moment we worship it, we’ve stopped practising it.

Humility isn’t weakness. It’s intellectual hygiene – the daily hand-washing of the mind.

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance” (Confucius)

Not knowing – and being at peace with it

Authors note:

Originally published on NoSacredCows.blog – where certainty goes to die.

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Influencer Interruptus

When even solitude needs a tripod. One man’s dawn swim meets the selfie apocalypse.

After an hour’s swim at dawn in glorious solitude, the sea smooth as glass, the horizon glowing like molten silver – I thought I had the beach to myself: two kilometres of unspoilt quiet. Then, inevitably, modern civilisation arrived.

A lone ‘content-creator-slash-YouTuber-slash-influencer’ appeared, tripod in hand. For forty-five relentless minutes she performed interpretive TikTok semaphore to music only she could hear – all legs, hair, and self-adoration – stopping and restarting each take with admirable determination. What was this, performance art? No, impossible. I’ve seen better choreography at a wake. So it could only be what’s now ironically called content – a word redefined to mean vacuous, pointless nonsense for fans with the attention span of a flea.

When at last she was satisfied, she packed up and drove away without a backward glance, leaving the sea, the sand, and what remains of civilisation exactly as she found them: untagged.

The tide, mercifully, is still analogue.

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Late Evening Swim – Thung Wua Laen Beach

By night, this stretch of the Gulf of Thailand becomes a quiet constellation of green and blue lights. The bright beacons strung along the horizon are squid-fishing boats, their powerful lamps suspended high above the decks to draw the squid towards the surface. Each light may be visible from as far as fifteen or twenty kilometres away, their glow mirrored perfectly in the flat calm of the sea.

Yesterday evening the water was so still, it felt like gliding over glass. I had two kilometres of beach entirely to myself, the surf reduced to a faint whisper. Thung Wua Laen shelves so gently that you can wade out fifty metres before the water reaches your chest. Beyond that, the sea shimmered green and blue from the distant boats – the only movement a faint pulse of phosphorescence when my hands broke the surface.

A swim beneath those lights, with the night sky overhead and the horizon glowing like a string of emeralds and sapphires, felt like slipping briefly out of time.

⁦https://youtube.com/shorts/l6oY4GVqfhA?⁩