Land of Hope and Glory

Land of Hope and Glory

Last night of the Proms, Hyde Park, London, September 8th 2007

The annual end of Proms gala has obviously become a national event, with spin-offs in every regional capital (including Carrickfergus, part of Norn Iron as Wogan calls it). There were many flags in Hyde Park, because and quite apart from it being a celebration of traditional British music, the Proms has plenty of pomp, circumstance, even pageantry attached to it which might be called ‘patriotic’.  But there were also other national flags: German, Swiss, Norwegian, even some African flags. I was about to say that one flag was notoriously absent, but then there weres everal skull ‘n crossbones, more prevalent formerly on the Spanish Main than in Hyde Park.  No, the flag I meant was the swastika, perhaps a model for all flags or a model of all flags.  Nevertheless, the event was a celebration of benign English patriotism, not aggressive continental authoritarian nationalism. Or whatever. There were lots of the usual popular classics, populist classics, and then something else that might be musak or just classic and popular populist.

Someone called Lesley Garret came on dressed in a union jack. The overall impression was a mite lurid, in yer face aggressive union jackery. I could imagine the guns of British battleships booming at Jutland, as they had once boomed at Waterloo or Plassey, as this symbolic Britannia rode the waves and furrowed them. She announced that England had won the cricket, the football and the rugby, not to mention the battles of Plassey, Waterloo and yet more and more battles, with great booming canonry mowing down the ranks of alcohol-bloated elephantry carrying their incumbent Maharajahs. That’s okay, I thought, but maybe later those elephant will prove heavy or handy, or handily heavy or even useless. Whatever, I was in for the night, the alcohol not flowing freely, a miserable grin or leering grin on my friend’s face. This was it, I thought, chocks away!

The traditional Proms format is now tried, tested and may be changed within the next few years. At least that was my feeling. Not to say that Terry Wogan was greyer and portlier than before, or his jokes better, worse or whatever. Perhaps it was my own presence at the event, because it seemed to me to be the kind of event that people like me, aka hintellectuals traditionally avoided. However, great intellectuals had fashioned the event itself.  Old poets like Blake, for instance. His poem ‘Senile Dementia’ or ‘Byways of Engelond’ or was it not ‘Jerusalem’ with music by Parry, not a Punk Rocker by any stretch of the imagination although there may have been more than a little of the Punk in Blake or Parry, perhaps more than we can possibly imagine. Someone called Will Young came on, left.  His work was neither musak nor was it quite jazz, but something between the two, some of it reasonably mellifluous. I longed for some hardcore Wagner or ranting Sex Pistols, something that might underline the unreality all around me, but then it was real too. The grass churned into a minor quagmire at the front, all those sing songs, singalongs, gadflies, butterflies, horseflies.

I left and noticed a new memorial to animals in history as the crowd croaked out the National Anthem, fireworks lit up the London skyline. I guessed that political correctness was perhaps being taken too far this time, a traditional British compassion had crossed over into something stupefying, foolish, silly, mundane.  Perhaps it was just over-compensation, a guilt-complex possibly, one ofthose poems rejected, crossed through by Blake turning up as a ps to all the history, or even a folly conscripted or serving as a meaningful momument.

Paul Murphy, Hyde Park, London