Before descending to my current level of seedy bohemianism I once, briefly, enjoyed a period of respectability, writing leaders for this great newspaper. And during that stretch of honest labour the subject of the European Union tended to come up from time to time. Times readers, being an intelligent and judicious lot, share a range of views on the question of Europe, but most tend towards a gentle, quizzical, mildly perplexed scepticism towards the claims made for the EU by its most ardent advocates. This made writing on the subject for this paper particularly pleasurable because the views I expressed were so closely aligned with most of our readers, and, indeed, the country.

But grappling with the questions of European integration had its frustration and one of these was the tendency that the integration-at-all-costs lobby had to try to browbeat opposition into silence by deploying language which allowed for no dissent. At its most absurd that meant portraying anyone with the mildest doubt about “the project” as a blood-and-soil-soaked reactionary anxious to plunge the Continent back to Thirties-style conflict. So, during the debate about the first European constitution, sceptics were told that they would turn the clock back to the Second World War. And yet, ironically, the European Commission had itself distributed a comic to children in which the drive to integration was led by a blond, blue-eyed figure called Captain Europa with a pet alsatian who was being thwarted at every turn by a swarthy, bearded figure called Dr D. Vider. No return to the Thirties there then.

But perhaps the single lamest canard to be dragged into the euro-debate was the single, transferable, travel metaphor. The integrationist ultras would use a succession of figures of speech in which travel towards a particular political destination (in their case the surrender of yet further powers without any quid pro quo), was seen as an inevitable journey from which there could be no rational deviation. So Europe was described, variously, as a bicycle (you had to carry on moving forward or you’d fall off), a motorway (did we want to be motoring ahead with the really impressive big countries in the fast lane or left behind in the slow lane?), and a train (if you didn’t get on now you’d be left behind, perpetually incapable of catching up).

What irritated me about these metaphors was the way in which they tried to close off debate by suggesting that the only choice left was the speed at which one reached a destination and not the choice of destination itself. The idea that it might be wrong to move towards a particular goal at all was unthinkable. The very choice of language was meant to eliminate the principle of choice elsewhere.

I tried, in my own lame way, to offer an alternative. Yes, I would concede that the European Union was a bit like a train. In both cases, once you got on board, food suddenly became more expensive. Shallow as my joke at the expense of the Common Agricultural Policy may have been, I hoped it might have some resonance. And whatever the future of food prices within the EU, at least one half of the equation is still powerfully relevant. Food on trains remains an amazing rip-off.

Over the past couple of months I’ve made several longish train journeys, some over the Border to Scotland, and enjoyed every one. But my enjoyment has been undermined by irritation at the way in which the train companies have treated their captive consumers. The buffet service is closed for long stretches of the journey (to allow for staff changeover and stock-taking we’re informed). And yet, despite the stops that allow for the changeover of staff and the taking of stock, particular lines of nutrition disappear, with advertised sandwiches no longer available after a certain point. And, whatever sandwich one does alight on, the cost is invariably well above the equivalent price you would pay for food anywhere else on the planet, apart, perhaps, from Heathrow’s Terminal 1.

It’s not as though the ingredients are particularly expensive, or the preparation especially breathtaking. Last week I enjoyed a cheese sandwich in which grated Cheddar, untainted by any contact with butter, salad, mayonnaise, pickle or indeed any other ingredient, fell from between two slices of white bread on to my lap as I tried to manoeuvre it into my mouth. I say I enjoyed the sandwich, and I did, but not in the normal sense. You know, the conventional pleasures of tasting, chewing and appreciating flavours.

They were all absent. As was most of the cheese by the time I got the sandwich to my lips.

Instead there was just the sensation of chewing limp starch with a whiff of a memory of something that might have been cheese on it. The primary pleasure therefore was in reliving the sort of culinary experience that, for me, defined the early Seventies. So in that, almost Proustian, sense I did enjoy the sandwich. It took me back to the age of three-day weeks and Stork as a sign of sophistication. On that train journey, simply by wanting to eat, I had travelled back to the future.

Why, I wondered, can’t the train companies provide a quality of food that even begins to compete with what we’ve now come to expect from Pret or Eat? Why do the staff need to shut the store for hours at a time to stock-take while customers wait outside? Do they do that at Starbucks? And then, of course, the realisation comes back to me. Just as in the unreformed EU, so on our trains, and indeed at Heathrow’s Terminal 1, only one way of doing things is allowed. And we’re all the poorer for it.

Three cheers for Shaw’s resurrection

The revival of two Shaw plays in a week (Pygmalion at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and Saint Joan at the National) has led to speculation about whether GBS is back. Having been written off as a prolix, opinionated, antique windbag whose preoccupations reflect a vanished world (that’s Shaw, not me, though some readers appear to disagree), his rehabilitation is viewed as a risky venture.

Whatever the merits of each production, I take exception to the antiShavianism fashionable for so long. For anyone who enjoys ideas, and likes the sound of them clashing, Shaw and his Edwardian contemporaries are compelling writers. H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are all authors who made ideas accessible to a curious, and expanding, audience. Well before Richard Dawkins made the question of God’s existence a matter of popular intellectual curiosity, Chesterton had eloquently refuted his disbelief. A century before our current debates on Islam and modernity, the same questions had been tackled by all of the above.

It is humbling to think how brilliantly the great Edwardian writers reached a mass audience when communicating serious ideas. It’s only because culture went down the blind alley of modernism after the Great War and succumbed to the avant-garde argument that seriousness went hand-in-hand with inaccessibility, that we lost our way. The renewed popularity of GBS suggests that we’re learning our lesson.

Oh happy rain

In one respect Gordon Brown’s election has brought back happy memories. It’s high summer, school hols have begun and it’s bucketing down – just like Aberdeen in the Seventies. Now my children can enjoy the life that was my privilege.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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