Last Friday. I’d arranged to meet Fran – the woman previously known here
as the Pocket Sex Goddess but who is far more than so stupid, insulting and
reductionist a title – at the Royal Festival Hall for an evening of Elgar’s
music performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra, a performance that included
Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Fran, who plays the cello, loves the Concerto. As now do I.
I’d never knowingly heard it before. It’s a beautiful piece
of music, different from and outside of the Elgar I was aware of, the loud,
Last Night of the Proms, flag-waving and anthem-chanting Elgar. It’s always a
wonderful thing to discover something new, especially if that something changes
an opinion you considered unshakable. It’s an even more wonderful thing when
that change comes in the company of somebody with the knowledge to guide you
into a new and better understanding.
As the orchestra performed, from the corner of my eye I
could see her doing the things she sometimes does when she hears music. Moving
her hands into position on an imaginary instrument, a thing I last saw her do
to the bassline in The Breeders’ Cannonball,
playing while we were in a diner one night. Holding her head slightly more
erect while listening to Enigma Variation #9, her love of the music at conflict
with the sadness it brings to her.
Before she arrived, and with a little time to kill, I walked
over Waterloo Bridge. On a slightly overcast evening, just cold enough to
justify a light overcoat, there are few better places to be. London evolves
continually; the commuters crossing the Thames every day may not be so
immediately struck by its changes, just as they may not notice a colleague’s
slow-growing hair, but as an only occasional visitor I was fortunate enough to
see how much my city alters in even a short time. New buildings, high and
proud, rearing above what was such a lowbuilt place; thankfully kept away from
the eyeline to St. Paul’s, showing the cathedral the respect it demands even as
their modernity throws its ancient glory into greater relief.
And the river. Always, always the river. Grey, mildly choppy
on this late Spring evening. Every moment a new construct, a new form carved by
its ever-moving waters. Growing ever more brilliant, shining silver as she
widens out past the City’s obelisks, the sky a dull grey-blue. Then, as I
reached half-way across, the clouds parted for a moment and sunlight the colour
of vellum notepaper streamed down onto the water, changing its colour from small
change to bullion. For the first time in far too long, I felt something
stronger than happiness.
I’ve been lucky enough to travel to many different places.
Some of those places still have a hold on my heart. The blasted dark landscape
of rural Poland, the explosion of life and colour of Barcelona; I’ll always
love them. No matter where I go though, I come back here, to the river, and
that sense of joy fills me, time and again. This is my home. This is my city.
Afterwards, we walked across together. The last piece of the
evening’s music still echoing in my head: Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in
D: Land of Hope and Glory. This is my city. This is my home. This, I thought as
I looked again at the water and felt again that sense of hopeless bliss, is my
country. My country is not a land of fear, not a place where we search for
people to blame. My country is one I love above all others but I do not, and
never will, think of it as solely for those who fit a constrained set of
Englishness. It’s a country of tolerance and welcome, of inclusivity, of
compassion.
It worries me, in these darkening days, that there seem to
be more people whose England rejects those values; people who would rather we
closed our doors, turned down our lights and kept ourselves quietly, primly, to
ourselves. Those people are misguided at best and dangerous at worst, and we of
all people should learn the lesson of history. England today, London today, the
same city that lifted my soul so swiftly and suddenly that evening, is reflected
not in their isolationism, but in the joyful variety of the Southbank market,
in the Spanish churros dipped in dark melted chocolate that Fran and I ate, in
the seemingly endless selection of vodkas we drank in a tiny Polish bar late
that night.
My London is Elgar; unchanging, traditional. My London is
the Thames; ceaselessly protean, always new. Both aspects always beautiful.
Plaese, don’t let it become anything else.
