As it happens the Mail’s front-page headline yesterday morning was “Queen held her mother’s hand as she softly slipped away”. The story went on: “It was, said one observer, as if she knew the end was near.” Just the kind of disgusting intimate detail that poor old Sissons was looking for.One or two of the BBC people provided the few moments of lucidity in a tepid lake of drool. Letts felt that they hadn’t “caught up with the public mood”. A public mood exemplified by his packed village church where “the national anthem was sung to not a few tears” Hypocrisy unbounded.The BBC couldn’t do it any more. Couldn’t fill the airwaves with absurd fantasy, pretend to unknow what they knew, pretend that their viewers were more than mildly interested, pretend Britain is a country of packed village churches They couldn’t dissemble convincingly They tried, God alone knows that they tried. They put the few visitors to the palace in centre shot.What for? What purpose does it all serve? Why project ourselves back to ourselves as something that we are not? Why do the same people who insist on depicting modern Britain as a crime-ridden hell, a wasteland of hypodermics and used condoms populated by feral adolescents, also insist on a parallel country that is supposedly full of docile, homogeneous patriots?I think they are slightly mad.David.Aaronovitch btinternet .
As a result of the whole “A Nation Mourns” stuff, this year’s April Fool’s Day jollities were largely suspended. All those hours spent by the humour sub-committees of our daily papers, sweating earnestly over what joke to play on their readers – witty, yet safely uncontroversial – have now gone to waste. For it was reported that, all over the land, clearance gangs are at work felling trees to make woodlands more “visitor-orientated”.The problem, apparently, has been that many of those who visited the countryside were too frightened to go into forests, having been influenced by The Blair Witch Project or by lurking memories of Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel.I laughed when I first read what I took to be a perfectly realised spoof. The scary statistics were there, presented by authoritative, patronising experts.
It is now essential, it seems, to attract “urban working-class people and foreign tourists”.To this end, 15 per cent of the Forest of Dean has been cleared to make room for walkways, car parks, visitor centres and look-out points. A similar tidying exercise is taking place at Grizedale Forest, in the Lake District, while millions of pounds is being spent on Queen Elizabeth Forest Park, in Scotland, in order to make it seem “less intimidating”.Some 25 per cent of all people felt vulnerable when in a wood, according to a survey conducted by Professor Terence Lee, of the University of St Andrews. “Water features seem to hold the greatest aesthetic value rather than the actual trees,” the professor revealed.So, sure enough, a man-made lake has been constructed in the Forest of Dean. The recreation manager of the Forestry Commission added that “we have started developing more areas where people can feel more safe, with dappled shade and open areas”.At this point, a terrible thought occurred The item was not a joke at all. What I had assumed was a rather brilliant satire on the aggressive ignorance shown towards the country by bossy town-dwelling authority figures, from the Government downwards, was in fact the real thing. The psychologists and recreation officers quoted were expressing articles of contemporary wisdom under which wildness is seen as inappropriate in a well-ordered society.According to this view, the only sensible criterion of how worthwhile a landscape may be is the number of tourists that it manages to attract. Or perhaps the actress Joan Collins could spearhead a campaign to reduce instances of inter-species violence in the wild in order to avoid upsetting any urban visitors.It is not so much The Blair Witch Project that is influencing the way we see our landscape as the Blair Countryside Project.Which is the more scary?terblacker aol
More from Terence Blacker.
When the then Princess Elizabeth was pregnant with Prince Charles in 1948, her parents were taxed with a ticklish question: was it time to end the bizarrely Ruritanian practice of summoning the Home Secretary – often in the middle of the night – to attend a royal birth? Sir Alan Lascelles, the King’s private secretary, thought the custom “out of date and ridiculous” By Lascelles’ own account, the King was inclined to agree. But the future Queen Mother thought differently, “seeing in this innovation a threat to the dignity of the throne”. When Lascelles pointed out to a horrified George VI that this meant “no less than seven ministers sitting in the passage” while the birth took place, the King’s resistance to ending the hallowed practice immediately crumbled.Trivial as it seems, this incident rather neatly illuminates an Edwardian view of the monarchy that has finally disappeared with the death of the Queen Mother. Quite a lot of silly things have been said about her in the past 72 hours, none more so than the remark by Lord Strathclyde, the Tory leader in the Lords, that she was “the last of a generation that really understood the meaning of duty”.It doesn’t really matter whether you prefer to contradict him with the example of the Queen herself – whose stoical endurance of obligations and afflictions over the past 50 years is hardly wanting in the duty department; or with the legions of anonymous 21st century volunteers and public servants, from soldiers to firemen, from nurses to – yes – teachers, who daily demonstrate the meaning of the word without ever having to use it. Either way it is so much sentimental, reactionary gobbledegook.But she was certainly the last of a generation in another sense. Professor Vernon Bogdanor may have been right to say in these pages yesterday that by inventing the walkabout, by her charitable works, by staying in England and visiting the East End during the Blitz, she helped to “modernise” the monarchy.