Farewell Montenegro, a phrase many Montenegrins have had to utter to make their way in the world, from the waiter who has sailed the seas – and seen Southampton, Falmouth and Greenock – to the architect who has helped rebuild lands from Palermo to Belfast. It is the inevitable path of ambition in a small nation, to travel to prosper. Many express a yearning for Ireland, which appears to them to offer a similar rugged beauty to their own and evidence that a small nation can do well in the modern Europe – well, these things are relative. Many of the other waiters are actually Serbs, quite a few students from Beograd working their summers beside the sea. With good English and sophisticated table skills they should go far, but that’s the problem: they have to, to get on, and that is often at cost to their homeland’s growth. Our hotelier said that they had to import staff, because the locals were less inclined to put in the hours and effort. On the home front, many weigh in at a substantial poundage, and I am not sure whether this is good fat or bad fat. In many native cultures, notably the Polynesian, weight signified wealth and the freedom to lard it over others. One of Noel Coward’s better quips was while watching the Queen’s coronation procession from a balcony on the Mall, and a friend looking down as Queen Salote of Tonga’s open carriage passed. “Is that her Prime Minister?”, he asked about the small man sitting next to the large queen. “No, it’s her lunch”, responded the wit. As we know, obesity in the UK and US is a disease of poverty, fuelled by a cynical industry pumping addictive salts and sugars into popular cheap processed junk. The food here has generally been excellent, with great salads, vegetables and fish not just in the good restaurants but in local bars and cafes, where the British equivalent would be much more resistible. So, my suspicion is that they generally eat too well. The peroxide salesman has obviously always done well in this region, although a close shave means the bottom has dropped out of the market. Nonetheless, sunbathers are a relatively modest bunch compared, say, to the south of France. We travelled over the mountains to Bosnia-Hercegovina, stopping briefly in Trebinje, on the Trebinjski River. The only, crucial difference here was the preponderance of mosques, where previously there had always been an over supply of churches. Getting in to the country from Montenegro was not so difficult, but exiting into Croatia was nearly two hours of state-sanctioned hell, roasting in the mountain-top sun as uniformed apparatchiks from both states put people through the third degree. Insofar that we UK passportees were eventually waved through without further delay, one can only surmise that this is a lasting vestige of post-bellum friction, a determination to make free passage in either direction as difficult as possible. Only last year, Spain introduced deliberately painful slow border crossing from Gibraltar, in an attempt to exert pressure on the British colony. So this officious abuse of power is nothing new. It is a potent expression of fear and hatred, and presumably what those in favour of UK withdrawal from the EU want. The relatively minor delays so far occasioned by the reintroduction of passport controls at Dover will be nothing to what will ensue if the Neanderthals win this one, with France no doubt retaliating as we revert to a Napoleonic stand-off. This is not civilisation. I have just finished Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, given by a knowing friend. It features an elderly couple on a last great journey through a mythic landscape, caught up in a quest to dispel the mist that has robbed them of their memory. It transpires that the mist has been generated to make opposing tribes – in the book’s case Britons and Saxons – forget past conflict and live in peace, much as Tito’s Yugoslav federation buried past divisions. The slaying of Ishiguro’s metaphorical dragon raises the spectre that such past hatreds might recur, as they did here in the 1990s. While the hatchets may now be buried for the time being, the piecemeal settlement of these renascent states, and their uneasy borders, is markedly different to the fluid communications of states within the European Union. Given vested interests which far outweigh ancient enmities, it seems feasible that peace would prevail for those admitted to the Union, whereas exclusion continues to provoke divisions, as it does with Turkey. It is hard to imagine that, in two years’ time, the UK’s only involvement with Europe might be in the Eurovision Song Contest.   Once back in Croatia, and in the European Union, the roads speed up and the new autoroute from Ploce to Split and Zagreb is a gem. It is, like the Zagreb-Beograd autoroute I travelled three weeks ago, almost empty. Croatians are not willing to pay the tolls, albeit a relatively modest €8 for roughly 100 km, so the investment seems to be mainly for the benefit of foreigners like us. This is the downside of the Union, the one which worries the Montenegrins: they fear getting overextended upgrading infrastructure to a level they neither need nor can afford. But their reliance on the tourist dollar/euro/yen means that they have little choice.