During the last world war, when people in Britain must have felt far more fearful than they do now, pleasure didn’t come to a halt. I was conceived a month or so before D-day, which may be proof.
When I was growing up, people remembered the war for its death and blackouts. But they recalled other people and episodes too: favourite radio comedians, visits to a treasured bit of countryside, the pleasant RAF fella they met on an overnight train. My own parents – how typically, I don’t know – spoke much more about that kind of thing than about El Alamein, Stalingrad and Herr Hitler. They spoke, in other words, about ordinary pleasures that had somehow been sustained, so that as a child my warlike view of the war – Spitfire v Messerschmitt in the school playground – had a counterpoint in parental memories of It’s That Man Again’s strange catchphrases, cycling holidays to north Wales, and how fresh the teatime poached eggs were at the boarding house in Largs.
At the end of the bleakest and most ominous year I can remember, I offer this list in the same spirit: 10 things that have given me pleasure in 2016, to set against the ventriloquist-dummy rictus of Nigel Farage, the ruination of Syria, and the accelerating melt of Greenland’s ice sheet.
1. Cherries from Fife
Cherries have always been my favourite fruit. Once they had a short season, late June to mid-July, and came almost entirely from Kent. Imports have made them available year round now, though to my mind New World cherries don’t have the bite and flavour of the European original. The idea that cherries can be grown as far north as Fife isn’t startling – I’ve eaten some grown on the shores of the Moray Firth. But last summer Co-op stores across Scotland were selling Fife cherries in plastic punnets, suggesting serious commercial cultivation. They were good too.
2. The Isles of Scilly
We had never been before. One May afternoon I took the coastal path that circles the biggest island, St Mary’s, and in the early evening came to the bronze age burial chambers and iron age settlement at Halangy Down. There was nobody else about. Big white stones and clumps of pink thrift sat among the greensward that ran down to the beach; shadows from a low sun made the scene more than usually three-dimensional. It was a beautiful moment, of a kind that human beings must have enjoyed at the same spot 2,500 years ago.
3. A favourite sentence
In an excellent New Statesman profile of Arron Banks, the Ukip patron who spent £7.5m on the leave campaign, Martin Fletcher wrote: “‘In 2001 he married again, this time to Ekaterina Paderina, known as Katya, a Russian … whom he met while attending a Britney Spears concert at the O2 Arena in London as the guest of an insurance firm.” (In fact, it was more likely to have been Wembley Arena; still, one gets the picture.)
4. Two good books
Simon Winder’s Germania was informative and entertaining about German history and the author’s Germanophilia – a book more relevant now, perhaps, than when it was published six years ago. Maurice Walsh’s Bitter Freedom gave a memorably humane and non-partisan account of the struggle for Irish independence and the ensuing Irish civil war.
5. Accrington Conservative Club
During a stay with my in-laws in Lancashire, I took a notion to see this abandoned Grade II-listed building, which is often said to have been the biggest Conservative club in the country. Accrington had reached the peak of its prosperity as an engineering and cotton town when the club opened its doors in 1891, one of a series of buildings (including a rival Liberal club, a town hall and a market hall) that these days look far too grand for their melancholy surroundings. The Tories gave themselves a five-storey palace in the Jacobean style with a sprung dancefloor used latterly by a club called Churchill’s. It caught fire only a month or so after I saw it. Little now remains.
6. The Broadway musical
I was lucky to see the Sheffield Crucible Theatre’s production of Show Boat, which ended its West End run four months early, despite enthusiastic reviews. Perhaps the trouble was the venue: the New London theatre has all the charm of an early Arndale centre.
7. Seaside encounters
The Firth of Clyde gets far fewer holidaymakers than it deserves, and nearly everyone who goes is white. But that is beginning to change. This year I noticed Sikh families in Arran, Bengalis in Kintyre and amateur fishermen who looked to be of east Asian ancestry casting their lines at Tighnabruaich. Assets, too, are changing hands. A rich Malaysian gentleman has bought Rothesay’s splendid old hydropathic hotel, while one of the town’s smaller hotels now flies the Indian flag. Government reports flag up concerns over the failure of migrant and host communities to integrate, but there can be no better sign of integration than a willingness to join the stoic traditions of the Clyde holiday.
8. One fine story
I came late to Alice Munro’s last collection, Dear Life. One of its stories, Dolly, is among the most perfect pieces of short fiction I’ve ever read.
9. One great play
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of The Tempest was a wonder well worth the fare to Stratford and the cost of a B&B.
10. Rus in urbe
On the advice of Gavin Stamp I walked up the Darent valley in Kent, between the railway stations at Eynsford and Shoreham. London seemed far away, but in fact it lay just over the hill: the separation of town from country felt sudden and complete. The highlights included visits to an excavated Roman villa and to Lullingstone Castle, where the plant-hunter Tom Hart Dyke has established his World Garden of Plants, which he planned during the nine months he was held captive by guerrillas in the Colombian jungle. Hart Dyke told us about his ordeal as he led us round his extensive collection of flora. Few stranger experiences are to be had within 40 minutes of the capital.
