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Precious memories

It's possible that I'm losing my mind, it's possible that my memories are not my own, it's possible that everything I regard as my personal history is malleable, not to be trusted, but I'm fairly sure my school didn't mark VE day when I was a kid.

I don't think yours did, either.

I mention this because Youngest Child's school is doing a VE Day picnic. Next week, I might add, so the date's completely wrong, but let's not let that detain us.

A VE day picnic? No big deal, I know, just a picnic. I'm not debating the rights and wrongs of it, more taken aback slightly. Why? When did this start happening? Or am I misremembering things entirely?

I appreciate that WWII is the building block of our foundation myth as a post-Imperial country, what with it being unequivocally goodies and baddies, and we get to wear the white hats, but throughout my childhood I feel this was just something that was taken as read. One never felt the need to bang on about it, quite the opposite. Triumphalist Nationalism was something nervier countries did, we didn't need to.

I wonder if this shifted during the reign of our Neediest PM, Boris Johnson (remember him? Bad luck), a man with a keen eye for jingoism to shore up a weak position, Johnson, undoubtedly the most cynical of Prime Ministers,  was very fond of of a socially distanced street party during lockdown (even while his own parties were, ah, less distanced). Even going so far as to brief that restrictions were going to be lifted ahead of VE day celebrations before they...weren't.

One of my strangest lock down memories is going for a mandated daily run and finding myself in the middle of a socially distanced street party.* Keeping to the middle of the road while households got as close to the edge of their gardens as they dared, and the sound of Vera Lynn drifted over the scent of burning sausages. I get why everyone needed an excuse for a party at that point, but it still struck me as anomalous.

I should state as a pretty strong counter-argument that Mrs Coastalblog, when I floated the idea for this piece, is firmly of the opinion that I'm talking out of my arse, and it's always been this big of a deal so, as I said at the start, it's entirely possible that my memories are playing me false, but I just don't 't recall it.

I wonder if it goes hand in hand with what I perceive to be a rise in flag-waving over the last few years. Though I am prepared to admit this could merely be my perception, we do seem to be somewhat immured in the past, and my feeling is that, as things have got measurably worse for large swathes of the population since the financial crash of 08 we have increasingly turned to flags as comfort blankets. Not in and of itself a bad thing, there's nothing wrong with patriotism, everyone likes to feel proud of where they're from, my worry is that it curdles all too easily into Nationalism, which is a different kettle of fish altogether.

Witness our most recent national myth, the 2012 Olympics, which everyone insists were the greatest of all time, as if there's any way to quantify these things, witness the ongoing disaster that is Brexit, wreaking horrendous damage to the economy even as people stoutly insist it was the right thing to do. We have a tremendous capacity for self deception  in this country but I wonder if, as these stories we tell ourselves become less and less plausible, we clutch yet more fervently to those we know to be true.

The success of Reform at the recent local elections (even though, predictably, the wheels are already starting to come off that particular clown car) showed that plenty of people are willing to indulge, or at least turn a blind eye to, the less pleasant aspects of patriotism: xenophobia, racism, isolationism if it gives them the opportunity. But it would, as I've already written, be foolish to attribute their success solely to that.

So, ultimately, I'm not stressing too much over a kids picnic, and I may well be talking complete bollocks, but my son's school event has sent me off down a speculative path and I think it's gone to some interesting places. The next few years are going to be pivotal ones for this country, whether we are to be altruistic, pluralistic and outward-looking, or retreat within ourselves and cling ever tighter to a national accomplishment which is already a long way in the past.

I know which I prefer, we should honour the past, by all means, but don't let it hobble the future.


* The absolute strangest was turning out of anything road and finding myself inadvertently at the head of a funeral procession, with mourners on each side of the road I had to stay in the middle, and jog as respectfully and solemnly as I could before I could turn off. That was weird.

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