Well, I am back from my little tour of Lincolnshire, or a small part thereof - it's a huge county, some of which (especially the flatter parts) have, I must admit, little charm, but most of which is full of interest (the Lincolnshire Pevsner is one of the fattest of the set - and no wonder, in view of its wealth of fine churches)and a good deal of which is far from flat. We drove through much lovely rolling countryside, lush, well wooded and watered, with grand distant views. As for Lincoln Minster, it is certainly up there with Canterbury and York, and I wouldn't argue with anyone who claimed it as England's greatest and most beautiful cathedral (e.g. Ruskin, who declared Lincoln 'out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles'). But what was most striking to one visiting Lincolnshire (and rural Notts over the border) from the uncivil metropolis was how pleasant and polite everyone was, in shops and restaurants and on the streets. There was a pervasive sense of the well-tempered hive, of people making at least the minimal effort to get on, to make life as smooth and good-humoured as possible because in the end we're all in the same boat. That is a sense that is increasingly absent in the great angry conurbations, and it felt like stepping back in time - through several decades - to encounter this sense of jogging along quietly and agreeably enough, rather than elbowing and shoving and self-asserting and kicking up. The reasons for the contrast are obvious enough: outside the conurbations England is much more thinly populated and much more monocultural, so there is less of the felt pressure of overpopulation and of the tensions that inevitably arise when it seems we are not all in the same boat, that we don't have the same interest in the common (unspoken) project, that it's every man for himself. Thank heavens London is not England - any more than New York is America, or Paris France - and that another, gentler country still thrives, and is there to be found once we leave the ill-tempered hives of our overlarge cities. Pace Philip Larkin, England is not yet gone - not by a long chalk...
Wotcha Nige. For a while now I've felt that, in many ways, the big capital cities (London, Paris, NY, Berlin) have more in common with each other than with the countries they happen to be in.
ReplyDeleteLincoln Cathedral is a damn fine building, but think how much better it would look if the reformers hadn't emptied every niche and scraped every last fleck of paint off the interior.
ReplyDeleteThe major global cities 'float' above the country in which they are located. They are detached and only weakly reflect the land over which they hover.
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ReplyDeletePeople here make a point of saying thank you to the driver when alighting from a bus and, usually, the driver makes a point of saying hello when you get on the bus. Try that in London and you'd be led gently away. The exception is the local Marks and Spencer where power-suited, knuckleduster-elbowed women fight over the smoked salmon before getting back into their black 4x4s. Modern cities have many virtues but they can also be big, dirty, overpriced aggression machines. Older, smaller cities, well that's another story: you can get the best of both worlds.
ReplyDeletepeople may be more pushy and physically agressive in cities, but I have found surly and unhelpful people in equal numbers all over the world.
ReplyDelete(On reflection, this probably means that I am just very annoying)
My last housemate was from lincolnshire and he was a very jolly chap.
London can be quite friendly and bits can take on the feel of a village if you stick around long enough. But I think as a lot of people have quite fleeting experiences of London they don't see this below the surface of the bustling metropolis. People do say thank-you to bus drivers sometimes - but in my experience only when there are very few other people on the bus. Perhaps this has a wider connotation?
ReplyDeleteI think it's very thoughtful of people to live on top of each other in cities, it stops everywhere else getting too cluttered.
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