Happy Anniversary?

An email arrives from an old friend who lives abroad. In it, he asks: “What is it like at home at the moment? It must be amazing with the celebrations for the Queen’s 90th birthday and the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death!” I replied along the lines that things are carrying on much as before. The TV channels are providing wall-to-wall coverage of the Queen walking around and accepting flowers from people, some of whom have been waiting for three days to see her, and you cannot move for some impenetrable Shakespeare quote being thrown at you, to which the stock reply is: what on earth did he mean by that?

The popular image abroad appears to be one of a country that is hosting parties on every street, festooned with flags, with Morris dancers on every corner. I did not wish to be too much of a killjoy in replying that it’s not quite like that.

I am not aware of a single street party in Bristol and I didn’t see from my little outpost in South Gloucestershire any sign of one of those 90 beacons which were lit “up and down the country”, as the BBC described it. If I am being honest, if it wasn’t for the media and, in very small part, social networks, you would barely know there was anything to celebrate and commemorate at all.

I am not trying to pour cold water on our nation’s history, but I would suggest that these birthdays and anniversaries are not quite as important to the nation as a whole as they are to the media. Perhaps it is my limited social circle, but there has been, for example, far more discussion about Liverpool’s emphatic derby destruction of Everton than there has been about her majesty’s birthday. In fact, if I am being honest, I have not come across one person who has even mentioned the Queen’s birthday or Shakespeare’s death day anniversary. There are certainly hardcore royalists, as there are hardcore republicans, but most of us fall somewhere in a very large middle, comprising of those of us who are republicans by nature who don’t care enough to campaign to get rid of it and those who think having a royal family is A Good Thing, never quite knowing why.

Senior school was responsible for my general dislike of Shakespeare. I was forced to learn it and the more I was forced, the more I hated it. “What did Shakespeare mean when he said X?” asked my teacher, to which I would respond, “If he was any good, he’d have written it in such a way that we would understand what he meant in the first place.” I should have added that Shakespeare produced, at least to my mind, the literary equivalent of a cryptic crossword and I hate cryptic crosswords.

My theory is that these stories are so prevalent because media folk themselves are more interested in them than we are. I remember the time back in 1977 when the Queen had her silver jubilee and I attended a street party in the Whitchurch area of Bristol. There were flags and bunting and trestle tables groaning with beer, wine and cakes. People talked merrily as the music belted out, but in all honesty it was a street piss up that, by nightfall, degenerated into a fight. 41 years on and there is plenty of appetite for a good piss up, but street parties are, in the main, a thing of the past.

It must be comforting for ex pats, gently grilling under a foreign sun, to imagine the old country raucously celebrating its history, but the reality is rather more mundane. The Daily Mail is celebrating the Queen’s birthday, thespians and luvvies are commemorating Shakespeare’s death but the rest of us, at least in Bristol, are far more interested in the visit of Exeter City to the Memorial Stadium today. Our history can wait. Three points are far more important.