I used to live on a road in London that the neighbours would often close for street parties – I’ll just come out and say it, Stoke Newington – and frankly I found the whole charade quite irritating. I was always cycling into a big plant pot someone had dragged into the road, that sort of thing. There would be a marquee up early on a Saturday with 6 Music playing too loudly for my hangover. You learn a lot about your neighbours when you watch them sit in the middle of the road and eat a focaccia finger: who, for example, has quite such a substantial amount of fabric bunting on hand at all times, and space for it in their house? I began to see them less as people and more like animals I might disinterestedly stare at in a zoo: lizards in a tank, pointing a finger to a lidless tub of hummus while saying, “Ooh that’s good – what’s that one? Red pepper? Red pepper. Yeah no I’ve never had that. Red pepper”.
Anyway, big year for it. The Queen is doing something – still being the Queen, by the looks of it, well done – and we, the peasants, are being urged to celebrate her for it. With the platinum jubilee around the corner, a host of very mild British stars – Gareth Southgate, Ross Kemp, Prue Leith, Big Alan Titchmarsh – are backing plans for a celebratory street party, where they hope 10 million of us will block up the roads and put stupid union flag wigs on, and wave and rah for the Queen. It’s called National Thank You Day, and to make it all feel slightly less embarrassing it’s being wrapped up with all the NHS rainbow stuff and community spirit newspeak of the past two years. It’s quite muddy messaging, actually. It really could do with one extra spin around the thinktank.
“Mainly it’s thank you to our Queen, who has served for 70 years,” Ross Kemp told Good Morning Britain this week, from in front of Windsor Castle (she’s not gonna let you in, mate). He went on: “It’s a big thank you to her but it’s a big thank you, if you wish, to staff of the NHS, people who have volunteered, neighbours who have gone round and just checked on people.” I really love the use of “if you wish” in that sentence – if you really must insist on thanking people who have done things, sure, but for me this is mainly about Lizzy Dos – but Kemp pivoted back to keeping it on message. “And by golly do we need a big party right now! But primarily it’s a huge thank you to an extraordinary woman who has steered this country and the Commonwealth for the past 70 years with – ” at this point Ross Kemp drops into his “gangs” voice “ – a steady hand.” Meanwhile, various MPs this week have drawn up plans to make Big Ben bong 70 times in a row in honour of the jubilee, too. Extraordinary what they can get done when they actually want to, isn’t it?
My beef with National Thank You Day isn’t with the Queen, so tell MI5 to call off the snipers currently aimed at my head. And it’s not with the members of the community we should be thanking right now – National Thank You Day actually emerged last year, as a sort of glorified NHS clap, and folding it up into the Queen stuff in 2022 probably does make people more likely to mark it. No: I suppose my problem with it all is that it adds to this bizarrely prevalent idea that we as a people got through Covid very nobly, thanks to that one speech the Queen did and the strength of Captain Tom and the inherent goodness and kindness of the Great British People.
This is not quite how I remember it at all: sure, some people checked on neighbours, and dropped shopping off, and banged a pan every Thursday. But many others called the police on people for going for two jogs in one day, posted disappointed photos from beaches of other people going to the beach, and tutted loudly whenever someone sat down on a park bench they could vaguely see through binoculars. Meanwhile, the group that we, the people, had duly elected to steer us through the storm were too busy going through the entire national supply of Colin the Caterpillar cakes to do much about it.
So we should not be packaging up the disastrous past two years in twee, apolitical, self-congratulatory “Keep Calm and Carry On” wrapping paper. National Thank You Day is ultimately harmless in the same way most British pomp is – put it in the basket with breathless 24-hour royal wedding coverage, the Last Night of the Proms, RAF flyovers and remembering the Olympic opening ceremony – but the “blitzification” of Covid cannot continue unabated. Let’s announce National We All Apologise to Each Other for How Frantic We Got Over the Past 24 Months day. See if Steve McFadden, Roy Hodgson and Charlie Dimmock want to endorse it.
Joel Golby is a Guardian columnist
