January 2006

[Nigel]

Rants are not always wise, especially mine. There was no criticism implied of anyone in my post, and especially not MLC Man, whom I could see was touched more than anyone and offered the perfect sacrifice in token - beer. Greater love surely hath no man than this.

No - I wanted to say two things really, and in my clumsy way I got it wrong, so here I'll try to explain.

Mainly it was about Sweder's post. It touched me greatly, and I was still thinking about it the next day. As were we all.

The shaggy dog story was an excellent one. It just struck me that we British are a funny lot, really. Real emotion, and important stuff, can be too tricky to confront sometimes, for too many people. When we come across it, we typically gloss over it, or deal with it through humour, which is healthy, up to a point. But that can spill over into ignoring emotion altogether and hoping it will go away.

It just struck me that the number of posts enquiring about the details of the duvet far exceeded the traffic that had gone with one of the best, most heartfelt and most bravely honest pieces of writing I have come across here. It was just a contradiction that I noted, which maybe I should have kept to myself. I thought it to be typical of that Britishness I mentioned just now.

I didn't mean to criticise anyone here at all. But this British reaction to emotive subjects is something which I do think is real. Bierzo Baggie makes the point that other nationalities, including Spanish people he would perhaps imply, have the same difficulty in dealing with that stuff. Of course, such things are difficult the world over, but I do think we British struggle more than most.

Maybe it's the stiff upper lip for which we are famous the world over. But I think it is more contradictory and confused than that. The edginess we feel in facing tricky emotions spills over uneasily into our reactions to public tragedy.

The most obvious example occurred after the death of the Princess of Wales. Diana was an enigmatic, complex, much-loved and much-wronged woman, but at least half the population had either lost patience with her manipulatively doleful eyes (that Martin Bashir interview), or thought that she was verging on the one nut short of a fruitcake. And then she died. And became a Saint. People wept in the streets. Football matches were cancelled across the country (for pity's sake). Celine Dion's ghoulish theme from Titanic was played on the radio 6 000 times a day for a whole week. Kensington Palace was buried under a mountain of flowers. The quote I can remember from a mourner in Hyde Park on the day of the funeral was - "You know, I never could cry when my mother died, but today I feel more emotional than I ever have". And yet that person had never ever met Diana. But maybe those emotions were safe exactly because of that distance. Just as they were for George Best more recently.

These are examples of the cheap, second-hand emotion which seem to affect our nation these days. Goodness knows, Daily Express readers (bless 'em) are still obsessed with Saint Diana, even all these years later.

And yet, at the same time, Diana's death, and perhaps also the Hillsborough Disaster which came before it, has perhaps catalysed some changes to our national emotional state. It is now acceptable to leave little shrines of plastic-wrapped flowers at the scene of a death, as has long been the practice in Mediterranean countries. I came across one of these on my run only last week. It's a small change, but maybe a significant one.

Nevertheless, it is still very much a rarity for emotions to be explored or displayed in public. Last week, I could just see all of us standing there, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, and then sighing with relief when a good opportunity to share humour popped up. It was like a bubble of tension being burst - Phew, that's lucky, we can talk about this one lads ! Fair enough.

For me, it wasn't the act of posting which really deserved any comment at all. It was the quality of the writing, and the ability to cover such ground in such a candid, and - illuminating style which I really wanted to remark upon. Ideally I would have managed to do that in a slightly more tactful way.

Carry on...