The best of times and the worst of times...

UNLIKE Don Burslam, who was excoriated by other readers (Yorkshire Post, June 7), I am not bored by those he calls Europhobes.

However, I am dismayed by their pessimism and paranoid siege mentality which sees Europe as two countries – us and them.

One reader claimed we were being punished by “the Continent” for their defeat in the Second World War. I was under the impression that we were at war with Hitler’s Germany.

A columnist speaks of “Europe” as if it is a hostile unity instead of referring to individual nation states.

Nor do I recognise the derelict Britain that seems to embitter so many readers. Yes, I live in an affluent area on the edge of the Peak District.

Yet some of the most jaundiced views seem to emanate from what I know to be corners of paradise in North and East Yorkshire.

A recurring phrase is “this once great country”. Does this refer to the old times of “Good Queen Bess” or the age of eminent Victorians?

Charles Dickens tells only half the story of his times. I recently watched a TV programme about this romanticised era. It reported that one in 12 women resorted to prostitution; if the mother could afford it , unwanted children were entrusted to “baby-farms” where, in some cases, they were murdered.

We may no longer rule the waves but surely life in 21st-century Britain is not really all that bad?