DO I REALLY CARE ANY MORE?

Well, actually I do but not so much recently. So long as we had the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, terrible infection and mortality figures from Covid and a rampant tweeting Donald Trump we had plenty to worry about and get angry about.

Suddenly Brexit is done, vaccinations are happening and, good heavens, at an alarmingly impressive rate of knots, and in a well organised way, and the Donald is silent and has gone. 

The sun is out and much of the world has snow. It’s chilly as winters should be. The critical issues that have been keeping us awake are resolved or resolving. There ‘s light at the end of all the clichés.

But things are getting worse. Because the little things like breakdowns in IT, a collapse in the Royal Mail meaning a friend called to say his Christmas card from us had only just arrived, a missed item in a supermarket delivery, oversleeping or an irritating paper cut have suddenly become issues.

With lockdown our world has shrunk. Events outside until now kept us aware of where we stood…maybe angry, enraged or alarmed but as part of a greater whole. Now we’ve become more inconsequential and vulnerable. I don’t get angry now; I just get irritated and (word of the week) peevish. Little things prey on my mind.

I tried apathy. But I do care. I don’t want to be alone. John Donne said:

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man 
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…” 

 But Brexit has seen to that, Scottish Independence may go further and lockdown, social distancing, masks and isolation have extinguished togetherness further. Goodbye untrammelled travel across Europe, goodbye hugs, smiles and kisses. It’s grumpy time for many.

Lunch is a thing of the past, I’ve forgotten how. I was thinking about Odin’s my favourite restaurant (long since ruined and then closed by barbarian owners) where conversation spilt like wine across the table. Real Masters of the Universe food and wine. Real original thinking. Or was it more ordinary…a fantasy I’m remembering?

Talking of fantasy I see some pundit economists are predicting a third quarter 2021 through 2022 boom in the global economy. Well, I wish. But an awful lot of retraining will have to happen as unemployment figures soar in hospitality, finance, retail, automotive and travel. That lot accounts for 8 ½ million jobs in the UK alone.

The Marylebone High Street I recall in 1960’s was full of gaps, lots of charity shops in prime sites, drear and uninviting. Until now this envy of the retail world was pretty ghastly back then. So, for sure, recovery and boom may well occur but not for some time, I fear, for most of us. The acid test will be whether the start-up revolution about which I’ve enthused really takes off but if it does (and  I wish fervently it does) it will take a while to bed down.

I am neither a pessimist nor an apathetic. I still feel part of this game of life and that I can make perhaps a small difference. And I do have a solution. Given the issue that will drive the economy is not money alone but human energy, enterprise and resolution. So, when we can, I’d ship as many young people as possible to the Democratic United States of America, to New York and say “get a taste of this for upbeat, chutzpah and energy and bring that back here”.  Show how much the Americans care. It’s infectious but in a good way.

OH MY AMERICA...

John Donne in his Elegy XIX, “On his Mistress Going to Bed”, written in 1633, compares the excitement of the New-found-land of America with seducing his naked mistress: “licence these roving hands”  he says.

On Friday we went to the Chineke! Orchestra playing a programme of American music as part of the Brighton Festival. (Chineke! is a not-for-profit foundation providing opportunities in classical music for Black and Minority Ethnic musicians.)

It was wonderful. We’d never heard a more impassioned or dramatic version of Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ or a funnier Copland’s ‘I bought me a Cat’. In addition to these composers we had Montgomery, Weill and Ibert.  We realised, as we listened there was this unmistakable American sound full of optimism, grandeur and wit. It was like listening to the best Hollywood film scores distilled into an expensive, sweet perfume.

For sure, we have our own local difficulties right now and the recent EU elections may well show an unwelcome rise of right wing parties but something even graver is happening across the Atlantic.

America gave me more frissons of excitement than anywhere else I’d been. To land at Kennedy and see the New York skyline sent shivers down my back.  To watch Aaron Sorkin’s ‘West Wing’ and somehow (how naive!) believe it was a true to life insight to American politics; to see Jeff Daniels’ (Sorkin again): 'America is not the greatest country in the world anymore', The Newsroom - 2012 – and to know no other writer in any other country would dare to write such a critical piece or for it to be delivered with such brio; to remember the iconic westerns that shaped my sense of right and wrong and, as with Elmer Bernstein’s music for ‘The Magnificent Seven’, to find myself humming it as I walked into a difficult meeting. This was my America.

And these were reasons why I had believed that America really was the greatest country in the world, thrilling, brave, fair and always innovative. The dreadful Monroe Doctrine had long gone.

But America has gone sour. I can no longer recognise it as the place that  brought us Gershwin’s music, Elvis, MoTown, Tom Wolfe,  Mohammed Ali, Michael Johnson and Sorkin or James Stewart. America has been stolen and I want it back.  Because it belongs to the whole world, not just Americans, it belongs to all our memories of progress and adventure. I feel a sense of sacrilege that the vast canvas boldly painted in bright and exotic colour has been painted over.

Perhaps it’s characteristic of our times that electorates sit passively as the past is written out and its culture is traduced and replaced by  shrill and discordant voices. Politicians everywhere are now becoming the sort of people with whom you would not wish to converse, let alone break bread.

In 1976 on my  first visit to America I felt like Donne:

“How blest am I in this discovering thee!”

Not anymore, I’m afraid. Not anymore.