3 minute read
BARTLEBY
Marking the occasion
Gosh, how the time flies! I can’t believe it’s already been 10 years since the last Jubilee, and 20 since the one before. It’s been 50 years since my little sister rode around the park with her bike covered in enormous rosettes made of paper plates and tissue paper! The bike was a rusty old beast that weighed a ton but on the occasion of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee it was a thing of beauty, like a mad mobile floral arrangement. The Chelsea Flower Show on wheels.
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Whether you love it or hate it, jump up and down waving a flag or stay indoors with the curtains closed, you won’t be able to escape the Platinum Jubilee. Royal occasions are historical markers. Like it or not, they form part of the fabric of our lives just as they did in the days of the first Queen Elizabeth.
I must have been about 10 when the bunting came out for the Silver Jubilee. I used to keep a diary in those days and although I’m not sure where the 1977 edition is just now, I can make a pretty good stab at how I recorded that epoch-making day. My literary style as a 10-year-old was terse and factual, so I would no doubt have written something like this: ‘Jubilee in park. Q good. 4th in welly wang (3.42m).’ How do I know that welly-wanging was a feature of that long-ago festival? Well, we lived in rural Lincolnshire. It was the 1970s. What else would we have done? My eighty-year-old mother can still give a welly a good wang, come to think of it.
She lives in a village in Somerset these days, in a quiet region where the monthly publication of the Parish magazine is much-anticipated. With everyone trying to enjoy life after the most tedious couple of years in history, the publishers recently put out a Jubilee special, filled with the various entertainments planned for local villages –10 years’ worth of gettogethers in one weekend. In my mum’s village nothing very memorable has happened since the Diamond Jubilee, the main highlight of which was an energetic game of rounders enjoyed by people of all ages and abilities. One particularly unforgettable incident involved a burly farmer whacking the ball, which flew very fast about four feet off the ground, just missing the small, unprotected head of our youngest.
Some 10 years before that he hadn’t, as they used to say, ‘been thought of’. Although in actuality he had been thought of quite a lot, just not actually produced. We happened to be in America for that Jubilee, the Golden edition, but somehow Ms B managed to procure some Pimms and a wide-brimmed hat that she decorated with over-sized tissue-paper flowers, so it felt just like home. Only hot. And sunny.
This time around I suspect that the people who do celebrate this latest Royal milestone will do so with considerable gusto. Others will find it baffling that citizens of the 21st century should care about something so old-fashioned. The problem with this view is it presupposes that life has changed fundamentally since… the past, and I think recent events have put paid to that idea. Weren’t plagues supposedly consigned to the history books? European wars too? What matters most, however, is that with all our gadgets and gizmos we still grow up, raise families and age – hopefully not too gracefully – like our ancestors of the first Elizabeth’s reign.
In celebrating this Jubilee, most of us will be thinking less about the monarch herself than about our own lives and our own families – the people we’ve lost and the ones we are lucky to have still. There hasn’t been a lot to enjoy in life lately, so I know I’ll be venturing forth, glass of Pimms in one hand, welly in the other, ready for some fun. ■
THE BRISTOL
MAGAZINE
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