Monday
I am on holiday in England after a long absence, ensuring my jingoism will come out in odd places. Clouds are better here (bigger, more pouffy). So are trees (taller, broader). A white loaf of Kingsmill I may once have despised instead triggers raptures – look at the doughy craftsmanship on that loaf – and I lose my mind over some tomatoes in Ventnor. “Is everything better in England?” my daughter asks caustically, before pointing out the water tastes funny.
If this enthusiasm is stoked by nostalgia, it seems in line with a general movement in the country that is perhaps more noticeable to those returning after a gap. Everything I pick up in the supermarket has a union jack on it. I see “made in Britain” labels everywhere and flags in the streets where I swear there were not flags before. I can’t tell if it’s Brexity, a growth in demand for local products, or just a hangover from the coronation. But in the four years since I last spent a summer here, the rise in UK branding is striking.
The main engine for my delight, meanwhile, is the weather. Friends at home in New York complain of swamp conditions of 30C punctuated by thunderstorms, while every night on the news, there is more footage of Greece and Spain up in flames, and US cities such as Phoenix, Arizona, suffering 19 consecutive days of 43C heat. But in Wales and Gloucestershire, where we spend most of the weekend, it rains every day. Not the hysterical, post-heatwave downpour of a New York July, but the regular cold rain with weak sunshine that has since the beginning of time made planning anything outdoors in the UK so difficult. It suddenly seems an extremely luxurious problem to have.
Tuesday
English weather and the sorrows lurking therein are the provenance of a certain stripe of English poet, among them John Betjeman, who might typically open a poem with the mild evening air and end it with a reminder that we are all going to die. Betjeman, much mocked by more swaggering poets, was appointed poet laureate in 1972, but only after being passed over five years earlier for being too twee, or as the then chair of the Arts Council put it, tweely, a “songster of tennis lawns and cathedral cloisters”. News of this and other poet laureate wars, which surfaced in papers released this week by the National Archives at Kew, also indicate that Cecil Day Lewis was only given the job in 1967, after WH Auden was considered too rude.
Poetry is, of course, far bitchier and loucher than any other subculture, including politics and fashion, and the notes around Betjeman’s appointment are delicious. Auden, observes John Hewitt, the government’s appointment’s secretary charged with advising the crown, is a liability, thanks to a pornographic poem he was suspected of publishing in 1969 in a magazine called Suck. Possibly not one of his best, Auden’s Gobble Poem contains the line, “my lips / Explored the adorable masculine tits” and the phrase “hot spunk”, which is definitely not canon, and which Hewitt summarised as “30 verses of an utterly revolting character”.
Weighing in on the shortlist, the largely forgotten poet Leonard Clark, meanwhile, dismissed Ted Hughes as “not a well-organised man”, bringing to mind pope/Catholic analogies, and George Barker for living “a rather wild life” – ditto. And so it eventually fell to Betjeman, poet of strong rain, weak sunshine and, as far as we know, nothing in the vein of Auden’s “‘shall I rim you?’ I whispered’” to surface and embarrass Her Majesty. Although his line from Death in Leamington – “and ‘Tea!’ she said in a tiny voice / ‘Wake up! It’s nearly five’” – still undoes me every time.
Wednesday
Poetry of a different kind in the buildup to yesterday’s release of Barbie, the summer’s biggest blockbuster and a welcome relief from the endless rollout of Marvel and Star Wars. As Barbie talking points fly, the brand’s power to trigger long-dormant loves and animosities is quite something to see. Among friends, there are those who hate the movie on sight for reminding them how they felt as children for falling short of the Barbie image, and those who want to relive it. For my own part, I had Sindies, not Barbies, and tended to hack their hair off and colour it with pens. I loved them not because they embodied a female ideal, but because you could wangle their legs out of their sockets and create a drama in which, victims of a horrific road accident, their limbs could be strewn across the carpet, requiring the swift and sometimes quite saucy intervention of Action Man.
Thursday
Free at last, free at last, the people of Uxbridge and South Ruislip are, on Thursday, finally free from the admittedly quite loose yoke of Boris Johnson’s governance, as the byelection to replace him gets under way. The seat, which has been in Tory hands since 2010, was predicted in the runup to tip towards Labour, although wildcards on the ballot – including Laurence Fox and Piers Corbyn, like names chosen in a party game for maximum recoil – threatened complications. The good people of Uxbridge, meanwhile, did their best to offer choice nuggets of scorn to the droves of TV journalists stopping them for comment, although none beat the woman who, stopped by a Sky journalist in 2019 and asked for her thoughts on Johnson, delivered what his constituents might consider the man’s political epitaph: “Don’t ever mention that name in front of me … that filthy piece of toerag.”
Friday
It couldn’t last. Three weeks into our trip I pass through Waterloo station at rush hour, meet an estate agent, and am forced to eat a supermarket bagel, all of which kill my newfound love for my country. Only a plaque identifying a park in west London as the site of a civil war battle in 1642 yanks me back from the brink and – looking dreamily up at a bank of pouffy clouds, threatening rain – reminds me there are things you get here the new world can’t deliver.
