Today is the day it all starts

Soft blessing of rain
On Friday 16th August 2019 the extended families of my (Leapling) niece, Rebecca, and her fiancé, Marc, gathered under a beautiful pavilion with a countryside view at King’s Croft Hotel in Pontefract. Rain fell like a soft blessing and the service was friendly and profound, as it should be when two people commit to each other in public in front of family and friends.

All the senses in play
Weddings unite. All our eyes were bathed in filters of happiness. All our ears were treated to wishes and hopes, desires and dreams for the couple and for each other. We had a wonderful feast of food and drink. All our hugs and kisses, dance moves – fast and slow – smiles and tears of joy and nostalgia reminded each person of other occasions, other people, including those who were absent and were missed, and other situations. You can’t help contemplate your own life when you see someone embarking on a new phase of theirs.

All the elements throughout the world
Why is marriage still a desirable rite of passage? Before the year 1184, religious leaders in England had nothing to do with weddings and the ceremony itself was only allowed inside churches in the 16th Century. For most of human history, the joining of two people together has been a secular affair, from the pagan woodland ceremonies (using the four elements of Air, Earth, Fire and Water) to the community handfasting represented onstage in Shakespeare plays like As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale. But throughout history, in every country in the world, in very different settings and buildings, following customs and rituals as varied as the people on the planet, humans still want couples to succeed when they join together formally.

Family and friends
I've always loved being a member of an extended family catching up at get-togethers. And it’s always fascinating to get a glimpse into the work and leisure lives of the couple being married. I can honestly say it was a day where goodwill was palpable, where love was, indeed, all around and in the air.

Daddy bear
The father of the bride, my beloved brother Chris, gave a speech from the bottom of his Little House on the Prairie heart. Did he blub a bit? Yes he did. Did I love him all the more? Yes I did. Aaron read the following, the final line of which provides the title of this post, though I’ve always thought (probably the form tutor in me) that every day is a fresh day, a new day, the day it all starts again….

Just two people in love
Today is a day you will always remember
The greatest in anyone's life
You'll start off the day just two people in love
And end it as husband and wife.

It's a brand new beginning, the start of a journey
With moments to cherish and treasure
And although they'll be times when you both disagree
These will surely be outweighed by pleasure

Secrets of marriage
You'll have heard many words of advice in the past
When the secrets of marriage were spoken
But you know that the answers lie hidden inside
Where the bond of true love lies unbroken

Today is the day it all starts
So live happy forever as lovers and friends
It's the dawn of a new life for you
As you stand there together with love in your eyes
From the moment you whisper ‘I do'

And with luck all your hopes and your dreams can be real
May success find its way to your hearts
Tomorrow can bring you the greatest of joys
But today is the day it all starts

Summer's Lease

Alex's afternoon tea and Morris Dancers in Badby

The world’s mine oyster
I’ve written elsewhere (see here) about how some places that are not officially home can feel like home. And so it was that August’s end contained a family visit to collect me from my week of bachelor vice…. the vice of glutting…. glutting on productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and soaking up interesting views by leading academics and theatre-makers at the annual RSC summer school. My first attendance at this event was in 1986, the year The Swan theatre opened and, although I haven’t been every single year, I’ve been more often than not. 32 years ago I was one of the whippersnappers and now I blend in seamlessly with the silver-haired and reverend Shakespeare fanatics.

RSC summer school and the 2018 Macbeth

Something Wicked This Way Comes
You need afternoon tea (thank you, Alex!) and the English/Moorish oddities of Morris Dancers tinkling their bells after such a marathon experience. After descending into the maelstrom of darkness that was a Time-dripping creepy Macbeth with Niamh Cusack, Christopher Eccleston, Edward Bennett, Luke Newberry, Michael Hodgson as Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Macduff, Malcolm and the Porter. After hearing challenging views about Macbeth and other plays and hearing from actors, including Alexandra Gilbreath who reflected on her previous performances and performed alternative versions of speeches.

2018 Romeo and Juliet to die for and Merry Wives of Windsor relocated to Essex

The Long and the Short of it
I thought Romeo and Juliet was a fine production, a believably youthful portrayal of the madness of early love (Karen Fishwick and Bally Gill) and performances by Andrew French and Ishia Bennison as Friar Lawrence and The Nurse that revealed their charismatic attractiveness but awful culpability in the tragedy that unfolds. The Merry Wives of Windsor was a different TOWIE kettle of fish – anchored by Ishia Bennison (again, as Mistress Quickly), Beth Cordingly, Rebecca Lacey and Jonathan Cullen as Mistress Ford, Mistress Page and Dr Caius but (happily for me) dominated by David Troughton’s Sir John Falstaff. There were more laughs than there probably should have been because of the skills of the actors (and the stunning Lez Brotherston’s set and costume designs) – but there will be other productions of this extraordinary play in years to come. A fitting quotation for both Romeo and Juliet and Merry Wives of Windsor is one of my favourite Shakespeare lines, a bit lost in the cartoon-world of this enjoyably shallow production:

O powerful Love, that in some respects makes a beast a man, in some other a man a beast.

Tamburlaine the Great, the play that unleashed Marlowe's mighty line

To be direct and honest is not safe
And so to Tamburlaine the Great, Marlowe’s two plays wrestled into one evening by ex-artistic director Michael Boyd with career-boosting performances by Jude Owusu and Rosy McEwan as Tamburlaine and Zenocrate. This was a hypnotic, careful, terrifying ensemble production with stunning music (James Jones) and evocative designs (Tom Piper with lighting by Colin Grenfell) and the whole cast should be applauded for their commitment to bringing the “scourge of the world” to full realisation. As if the RSC summer school glut of productions was not enough, I then indulged with Michael, my Shakespeare buddy, in a double-bill visit to Shakepeare’s Globe on London's South Bank to see strong productions of The Winter’s Tale and Othello. I’m often criticised for being too positive about life and always seeing the good in things – but although there were things I could carp about (certain lines, certain moments, certain perverse decisions) I always remember what it’s like to stage a production (in my 32 years of teaching) and try to appreciate at least what they were trying to do. (Hard to forgive the shit bear! in Winter’s Tale – but a pure revelation (to me) to have a black Michael Cassio in Othello. Mark Rylance, of course, was a devastatingly affable and disingenuous Iago – and I genuinely mourned the loss to the world at the death of André Holland’s Othello.

London's South Bank and Othello and The Winter's Tale

The School's The Thing

A leaf on The Greenwood Tree, Michael Thompson and Robert Lister

Back to the street across the ford at the River Avon
And so back to Stratford-upon-Avon, this time for a retirement present for my Shakespeare buddy, Michael. We’re enthusiasts for productions of Shakespeare and, in particular since the mid-1970s, the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company. And so I planned a geek day of exhibitions, walks and tourist attractions; things that you can fit in when the demands of paid work are in the past. Luckily for me, I also had a secret weapon for two bits of the day: actor Robert Lister, the partner of Pat, one of my long-standing friends from the world of drama teaching.

The Play's The Thing exhibition at the RSC and the view across the Great Garden at New Place to the theatres

A leaf for his pages
I included a picture of The Greenwood Tree in my blog about New Place, but I didn’t know that Rob and Pat already had an engraved leaf there so it was a thrill to find it on the wall when Rob helped us envision the outline of the roofspace and floor plan of New Place.

Busts in the Schoolroom decorated by pupils at the current school on site

Ripe voice of Raconteur
Rob is a journeyman actor, known for work with the RSC, National, English Touring Theatre, one-man site-specific shows and as Lewis Carmichael in The Archers. On this occasion he was a vivid storyteller bringing to life not only New Place but also the extraordinary Schoolroom and Guildhall, renovated in recent years and opened to the public.

The cradle of the bard's imagination and a very very early Tudor rose (the first ever depicted?)

The child is father of the man
It is inconceivable that Shakespeare didn’t attend the Schoolroom above the Guildhall in Stratford, given the status of his father, John Shakespeare, as alderman, chief magistrate and bailiff at various times. One of the more romantic concepts illustrated in the displays at the Schoolroom and Guildhall was how likely it was that the child Shakespeare would have observed petty trials and travelling actors as his father presided over the Court of Record and granted licenses to the touring companies. The trial scenes in plays like The Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale surely had their seeds sown here. And did the young Shakespeare leave with one of the companies when he was in his early 20s, father of three young children but, critically, son of a man who was facing financial ruin by then? Shakespeare travelled and then started to commute between Warwickshire and the capital, desperate to find a level of success – as he eventually did as actor, writer and, most significantly for his family’s economics, as theatre shareholder and landowner in both London and Stratford.

The Guild of the Holy Cross, next door to the Guildhall with a stained glass window depicting Edward VI and John Shakespeare and extraordinary wall paintings

Make your garden rich

Hidden gem

Out near the East Coast, positioned between Hull and Scarborough, lies Burton Agnes Hall and Gardens. It’s a house in a private trust and we followed a recommendation to pay a visit there. It’s not English Heritage, it’s not National Trust. It’s beautifully kept and there’s plenty to do for a whole day, particularly if you’re keen on gardening.

Annie and Joyce

During their lives, my Mum, Annie Penn, and Sally’s Mum, Joyce Allard, loved spending time pottering in their gardens. So it seems somehow fitting that tending our garden at home now has become a retirement activity. Not for me, alas, tapping and scribbling away indoors at my novel; but for Sally who’s developed an absorbing interest in shrubs, hedges, flowers and soils – and their arrangements, colours, hydration and upkeep. Gardening seems to be a bottomless pit of possibilities with so many variations and complications and hits, misses, false starts, surprises, successes, uprootings, feeding, fertilising, mulching, raking, digging, watering, staking, supporting, planting, replanting, pruning and dead-heading. 

Gardens as metaphors

Writers through the years (poets, playwrights, novelists and journalists) have often turned to gardens and nature when trying to express essential things about humanity. The concept of growing something from seed, nurturing it, tending it in its maturity and then deciding when to put it out of its misery or start again has inbuilt metaphorical potential. A garden can be seen as:

• a country (the “garden of England”)

• a road map of setting priorities and organising time

• an emotional history

• a place to form roots, tame the wild and form patterns

• an area of your life to prune, weed and declutter

• a tangible expression of reaping what you sow

• a loving harvest of time and effort

• a place of rest and contentment

Burton Agnes

The house at Burton Agnes is a massive Elizabethan pile and inside feels lived-in and homely even with spectacular rooms like the Long Gallery and elaborate ceilings and exquisite wooden paneling. But, unusually for me (a sucker for historical houses) it was the garden that sticks in my mind: luscious, dramatic, flamboyant, classical in parts, cottage-like in parts, fuzzily colourful in parts, blazingly daring at times; nooks, crannies, secret paths, weird juxtapositions. It helped that the sun was shining. It helped that one of the characters in my novel is a gardener so I was open to be influenced.

Gentler scion and wildest stock

Sally isn’t a character. She’s real life. And she’s the gardener of my heart. In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale Perdita argues that she only wants to plant pure breeds of flower but Polixenes argues that sometimes when you put together two unlikely things (grafting is the gardening term!) art can improve nature. I sometimes wonder if that’s what happened in 1986 when we got married – the art of marrying improved our individual natures to form a new hybrid plant.

You see, sweet maid, we marry

A gentler scion to the wildest stock

And make conceive a bark of baser kind

By bud of nobler race: this is an art

Which does mend nature, change it rather, but

The art itself is nature.

Happy Anniversary.

Home from home

Secret Santa Home from home

Home from home

I understand Americans use the phrase home away from home whereas people in Britain use home from home to mean being somewhere that you are as comfortable and relaxed as you are in your own home. I feel that way about visiting the Thompsons in Badby, Northamptonshire. I first met Michael at the Royal Shakespeare Company summer school in 1986 and Janet and Sally met soon afterwards and our daughters have been friends with each other ever since their arrival on the planet.

Mini campanology home from home

Escaping to a better world

I hope 2017 turns out to be a fulfilling year and that the political realities (Brexit and PresiTwittiTrump) somehow produce a better world. Time will tell. Maybe writing a speculative fiction saga as a retirement hobby is my escapist way of coping with the harsh truths (or post-truths) of the fall-out from 2016.

Caspar and Alex unaffected (as of now) by PresiTwittiTrump, afternoon tea at Fawsley Hall, beware the RSC bear!

Culture endures, friendship remains and Christmas will come again

In the midst of the political turmoil, though, the village of Badby still stands. The trees keep growing, nature endures. We will see productions as inventive as Greg Doran’s The Tempest again. We will eat delicious food and drink quaffable wine. We (the human race) will survive at least another year. Who knows what next year will bring? Yes, Winter is coming (literal and metaphorical) but so is Spring and, before long, Christmas will come again.

See what death is doing

RIP: Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher, Victoria Wood, George Michael, Anton Yelchin, David Bowie, Alan Rickman

So many deaths

2016 has been notable for the large number of “celebrity deaths.” It could simply be a coincidence that the people who first became internationally famous through mass media outlets are reaching that stage of life: Fidel Castro, Ronnie Corbett, Harper Lee and Peter Vaughan all had long and fulfilling lives so their passing seems fitting. Some, though, seem untimely: Caroline Aherne, Prince and, in just the last few days, Carrie Fisher (followed within 24 hours by her mother who had been ill for some time.)

RIP: Sir Terry Wogan, Paul Daniels, Carla Lane, Harper Lee, Peter Shaffer, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Caroline Aherne, Barry Hines, Prince, Gene Wilder, Robert Vaughn, Muhammad Ali

Life goes on

The only absolute certainty of life is Death. Everything else is random genetics, choice, negotiation, compromise, luck and manipulation. Death, however, no matter what other choices we make or cards we are dealt by nature, comes to us all. And the human race carries on. Striving, mostly thriving, aspiring and living in the shadow of the certainty of death. The tinsel time of year heightens feelings about grief as we go about celebrating, eating, drinking, reflecting on the past and planning the future. The following exchange in The Winter’s Tale always strikes a chord for me, although the promised “recovery” is hard won. Hard won.

PAULINA:     This news is mortal to the queen: look down
                    And see what death is doing.

LEONTES:                                             Take her hence:
                    Her heart is but overcharged. She will recover.

Judi Dench as Paulina in The Winter's Tale - Judi is currently thriving and working still, but has an acting style that, in my opinion, gives you birth, life and death, strength and vulnerability, comedy and tragedy - all combined in a poignant and appealing personality.

Thou met'st with things dying, I with things newborn

Favourite play?

I was often asked by students to name my favourite Shakespeare play or poem or sonnet. I have always found it an impossible task because each work contains moments of sublime stagecraft, astonishing language, profound thematic concepts and fundamental ideas about human existence. And most of the plays contain at least one bit of tatty old rubbish: clumsy characterization, an underwritten scene, some impenetrable phrases, images that no longer make sense and, of course, Shakespeare was writing for a stage with particular constraints (the most glaring being the inability to employ living breathing women as actresses, so female roles are fewer than they should be.) It surprises some people that I am happy to talk about the rubbish bits in Shakespeare, but, for me, it makes his work all the more wonderful for its raggedy unevenness. What I do know is that the best way to experience Shakespeare is to see it or hear it – always my philosophy as a teacher. Simply reading Shakespeare is only a fraction of the experience.

Exit, pursued by a bear - the famous stage direction from The Winter's Tale

Favourites at certain times

A good production can make any play feel like a favourite during its two or three hours length. My first Hamlet and my first Love’s Labour’s Lost were experienced at Bolton Octagon when I was a student in Manchester. I remember the Hamlet starred Douglas Hodge as the Prince and Ophelia’s dead body was brutally zipped up in a body bag on a pile of ruins in a war-torn “Denmark.” Love’s Labour’s Lost was directed by Ian Judge and set in an Oxbridge quadrangle, anticipating the designs for Kenneth Branagh’s film of the play. In both cases the plays were sparklingly clear for me and I became convinced that Shakespeare plays could survive being set anywhere anytime. Whenever I directed students in productions of the plays, each play became a favourite for the time I was working on it. But some plays have always been in the top five and The Winter’s Tale is one of them. Sally and I therefore travelled over to Bolton Octagon to renew my acquaintance with that theatre and had a great evening in Sicilia and Bohemia.

Sicilian scenes in David Thacker's The Winter's Tale at Bolton Octagon. Photographs by Ian Tilton

David Thacker’s production

The cast were uniformly strong:

• Rob Edwards brought Leontes’s morbid jealousy and consequent grief and remorse to blistering life 
• Amy Nuttall was a heartbreaking Hermione, dignified and queenly
• Margot Leicester created a Paulina that was compassionate as well as formidable and determined 
• As Polixenes, Christopher Wright personified humility (and later paternal rage after some comedy capering) 
• Christian Edwards’s Young Shepherd and Eric Potts’s Old Shepherd were delightfully unpretentious and endearing 
• Colin Connor was an engaging and appealing Autolycus 
• The young lovers, Harry Long as Florizel and Leila Mimmack as Perdita, were direct, vivid and vigorous 
• Most touching of all, I found Marc Small to be a compelling Camillo; both on and off text the actor was a brilliant listener and reactor to every nuance of every line spoken by every other character.
  

James Cotterill’s set and costume designs were clear in revealing the play’s moods and David Thacker’s direction was masterful in controlling the pace and the strange changes of tone in this extraordinary play.

Bohemian scenes in David Thacker's The Winter's Tale at Bolton Octagon. Photographs by Ian Tilton

Favourite lines

As well as being one of my favourite plays, The Winter’s Tale contains some of my favourite lines, spoken by Florizel to Perdita at the sheep-shearing festival after she has distributed flowers. The best way to appreciate Florizel’s sentiment is to say the words aloud (gently and calmly) and appreciate how the sound of the words echo the contents of the speech, so that “move still” and “still so” sound (to me anyway) like the “wave o’ the sea” in the previous line….

                        What you do
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet,
I'd have you do it ever: when you sing,
I'd have you buy and sell so, so give alms,
Pray so, and, for the ordering your affairs,
To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that: move still, still so,
And own no other function. Each your doing,
So singular in each particular,
Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds,
That all your acts are queens.

Florizels and Perditas from the net. Main picture = by Ian Tilton of Harry Long, Eric Potts and Leila Mimmack at Bolton Octagon

Remain or Brexit pursued by a (Russian) bear?

Harriet's birthday at Bolton Abbey.... Harriet's French-speaking job is in the balance....

Contemplating potential sadness

Being retired I have been able to spend many hours reading about tomorrow’s EU referendum. I have tried to read more Brexit than Remain arguments because some of the people I love are contemplating voting to leave the EU and I want to be able to understand if the vote does not go the way I hope. My initial instinct was to Vote Remain, largely because I believe that global cooperation is a better future for mankind than individual countries going it alone; but the more I have read and studied, the more I am now a Remainer by absolute conviction. If tomorrow the country votes to leave the EU, I will be extremely sad.

The Botanist in Leeds - need to celebrate Life, Birth, Optimism, Future....

Rocking the boat

The UK is currently in a gradually improving recovery period – and it seems to me that Rocking the Boat would take us backwards politically, economically, culturally, historically and philosophically. If we Brexit tomorrow, not only will we need a bigger boat, we will have to start – without hesitation – building a brand new boat, on our own, without instructions! That might work if we could

• operate in glorious isolation and ignore the rest of the world
• close our island borders
• fill all the vacancies in the jobs that Brits don’t want to do
• trade with only ourselves until we can renegotiate all the international deals that we currently have by being a member of the EU. The historical pattern of international trade has involved in the first place multilateral negotiations centred around the World Trade Organisation, currently dominated by the US and the EU; and, then, a new wave of bilateral trade deals involving major negotiations with a whole series of countries including the US, China, India, Indonesia, the Phillipines – in these deals the EU is the world leader and these are the ones we would have to negotiate as an individual country (“back of the queue”as President Obama pointed out). Unless of course we applied to join the Single Market and thereby accept free movement of people…
• and re-integrate the 1.2 million non-taxpaying ex-pat (mostly) pensioners from Spain, France and Italy whose residency rights in Europe will have to be negotiated according to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties which is very explicit: the acquired rights of states are preserved upon termination of a treaty; but the situation of natural and legal persons is to be determined by agreement (either in advance or upon exit.) The EU Treaties make no provision in advance; residency rights have to be agreed upon withdrawal. If they all have to return, they will become a (non-contributing) drain on our current resources.

Labour In

My Mum always voted what Labour voted and the official Labour line is Labour In. Thus, in honour of my Mum the past two weeks, I have been out leafleting, pounding the local pavements with Labour In campaign leaflets and I am now living in a house with a Labour In garden post.

For whom the bell tolls

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
(John Donne)

Overwhelming support from admirable sources

Why are people suddenly frightened about intelligent expert opinion? About evidence-based research? If you were going to have an operation, you would want an expert to operate on you. If you were going to send an astronaut to the International Space Station, you would want an expert to go there. It is perverse to disagree with the overwhelming number of intelligent individuals and groups who are supporting the Remain campaign with public and detailed letters (references can all be found on the Wikipedia page here):

• 1,285 business leaders in a letter to The Times today
• 200 senior Healthcare Professionals working for the UK NHS right here, right now
• 150 scientists and researchers working in all branches of Science, led by Professor Stephen Hawking
• Over 100 university leaders
• 279 leading economists
• 300 leading lawyers
• 300 leading historians
• the 18 most senior leaders of the Armed and Security Forces
• Premier Football League boss, Richard Scudamore and Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger (who both want the UK national teams to stay in the Euro Football Tournament)
• 300 Writers, Artists, Architects, Actors, Directors, Painters, Comedians, including, for example, Eddie Izzard, JK Rowling, Jo Brand, Tracey Emin
• 25 of 30 Cabinet Ministers
• President Obama and the vast majority of world leaders
• 25 major newspapers and magazines including The BMJ and The Lancet (health professionals), The Farmers Weekly, The Economist and, surprisingly, The Mail on Sunday and The Times (possibly because of the letters they have been sent)
• 16 Local Government Authorities
• major organisations like the CBI, National Farmers Union, Universities UK, Quakers, Friends of the Earth, the Round Table, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the TUC (and all major trade unions including the Fire Brigades Union and UNISON)
• Archbishops of York and Canterbury, 
• CEOs of All UK Airports
• Bosses of Asda, Aviva, BAE Systems, BMW UK, BP, BT, Burberry, Cisco, Dixons, Easyjet, Ford UK, Fujisu UK, Jaguar UK, Lastminute, Lloyd’s, London Stock Exchange, M&S, Mothercare, National Express, National Grid, Ocado, 02, Pearsons, Prudential, River Café. Rolls Royce UK, Ryanair, Santander UK, Shell UK, Siemens, TalkTalk, Unilever, VirginMedia, VirginMoney
• The Labour Conference on the basis of
• jobs
• investment in our economy
• protections for workers and consumers
• increased security that cooperation with our continental neighbours provides

Brexiters include:

• Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Michael Gove, Ian Duncan Smith
• Dennis Skinner and Frank Field (latter two Labour MPs I greatly respect but disagree with on this topic)
• the Shipley MP Philip Davies (my own MP....)
• Donald Trump, former Australian PM John Howard
• Rupert Murdoch
• Katie Hopkins, Julian Fellowes, Michael Caine
• The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express and another 9 newspapers including the Communist The Morning Star 
• 5 declared major employers: Aspall Cider, Go Ape, JCB, Tate and Lyle and Wetherspoons

Do I want to ally myself with these people?

Brexit pursued by a (Russian) bear

Not a Shakespeare reference to The Winter’s Tale this time, but my worry that Russia will celebrate the most if the UK leaves the EU. A fractured Europe would please Putin profoundly; the list of conflicts between and within European states suggests that it won’t be long before rivalries erupt if, as predicted, a Brexit leads eventually to a collapse of the whole European project and the end of the single market, the most advanced trade agreement on the planet (currently with no close competitor.) Time and again throughout our history we have entered European conflicts, sometimes starting them by way of conquest and sometimes in order to protect our independence by stopping another power from swallowing smaller countries. Michael Dougan’s lecture summarising the reasons to Remain is very persuasive and his further comments (on the university of Liverpool website) about immigration are compelling.

If you’re not prejudiced against experts, and are still unsure which way to vote, some extracts from their letters are below

Extract from what the NHS professionals wrote:

"As health professionals and researchers we write to highlight the valuable benefits of continued EU membership to the NHS, medical innovation and UK public health…. We have made enormous progress over decades in international health research, health services innovation and public health. Much has been built around shared policies and capacity across the EU…. EU trade deals will not privatise the NHS as the EU negotiating position now contains clear safeguards. Decisions on NHS privatisation are in UK government hands alone. EU immigration is a net benefit to our NHS in terms of finances, staffing and exchanges…. leaving the EU would not provide a financial windfall for the NHS".

Extract from what the university leaders wrote:

"Inside the EU, we are better able to collaborate with partners from across Europe to carry out cutting edge research, from medical and healthcare advances, to new materials, products and services. In the EU, the UK is also a more attractive destination for global talent, ensuring that our students are taught by the best minds from across Europe. This has a direct impact on our economy, driving growth, generating jobs and ultimately improving people’s lives".

Extract from what the leading historians wrote:

"On 23 June, we face a choice: to cast ourselves adrift, condemning ourselves to irrelevance and Europe to division and weakness; or to reaffirm our commitment to the EU and stiffen the cohesion of our continent in a dangerous world.

Extract from today’s letter to The Times by business leaders:

"Sir, We own and run more than 1,200 businesses, from micro companies to the FTSE 100, employing more than 1.75 million people. We know our firms are stronger in Europe. Our reasons are straightforward: businesses and their employees benefit massively from being able to trade inside the world’s largest single market without barriers. As business people, we always look to the future — and a future inside the EU is where we see more opportunities for investment, growth and new jobs."

Extra material from Professor Michael Dougan addressing immigration:

"– a significant majority of the foreign nationals living in the UK (2/3 at the last national census), and over half the net immigration each year, come from outside the EU. That is almost entirely within our own domestic competence and power – we seem to be good at immigration, without needing any help from the EU.
– as regards those EU nationals who come to the UK: it is completely dishonest of prominent Leave campaigners repeatedly to claim that there is some sort of unconditional right to move to and settle in another Member State. We all have a right to circulate – that is the basis on which, e.g. we go on holiday to Spain and France. But when it comes to settling in another country, there are three main categories of right under EU law:
for the economically active (ie in work and paying taxes)
for students (eg enrolled at university and thus paying tuition fees)
and for those wealthy enough to look after themselves and their families without relying on public benefits.
There is no right to “benefit tourism” under EU law.
– Against that background, it is unsurprising to find that – according to all the objective social science research – EU migrants are significantly more likely to be younger, better qualified and economically active; they pay far more into the country in work and taxes than they take out in public benefits or services.
– When it comes to the particular situation of Eastern European migrants, we are rarely reminded of the fact that the UK was one of only three Member States (the others being Ireland and Sweden) that chose not to impose transitional restrictions on the rights to free movement of new EU citizens during the “Big Bang” enlargement of 2004. We chose to let these people come here as we did; no one forced us to and we could have decided otherwise. Small wonder that many other Europeans regard the UK debate as rather hypocritical.
– And nor should we forget that free movement is a two way street. Massive numbers of UK nationals travel for pleasure, study and work around the EU – taking advantage of all the benefits and convenience and protection EU law offers. Around 2 million UK nationals have also settled in other Member States – and the objective social science research suggests that those migrants are more likely to be economically inactive, ie they are not actively contributing through work and taxes to their host society. Again – small wonder other Europeans think there is a real double standard at work in the UK debate.
– It is also worth recalling that the accession of future Member States requires the unanimous agreement of the 28 governments plus their national ratification processes. The only large applicant is Turkey – and there is no realistic prospect of Turkey joining the EU within any of our lifetimes – not least since several countries have indicated that they would hold national referenda on any Turkish deal, obviously in the expectation that their populations would overwhelmingly reject it.”

Vote Remain!