I am browned off with nearly everything modern: buildings, music, art, language, so I was rather cheered to hear that artistic director Emma Rice is leaving the Globe. Good. She can do her neon/electric lights and modern noise and “challenge the sanctity of Shakespeare’s words” somewhere else. Then we’ll still have at least one place left that feels “authentic”, because that’s what I like, along with anything else a few centuries old.
I’m not making a blanket judgement here. I appreciate progress: improved plumbing, lovely clean lavatories. I’m not hankering after a cess-pit in the basement. I’m grateful for hot water, antibiotics, anaesthetics, Nordic noir and the end of cock fighting, but I could do without wambly, plinkety-plonk modern “classical” music, onanistic Young British Artists, installations, performance art and the Turner prize, brain-scrambling multi-media, and mine’s-bigger-than-yours skyscapers.
Of course, this is just my opinion. You can all like what you like: gigantic, blank, concrete and glass slab buildings; pretentious, incomprehensible art; deafening cacophony music – impair your hearing if you wish. I don’t mind. Live and let live. But it would be heaven if you modernists could stop calling us traditionalists snobs and luddites, and sneering at the words “authentic” and “heritage”, and at those of us who prefer their art, music, literature, language, crockery and furnishings to be pre-1900, with a few exceptions either way. I don’t like to be too rigid.
And these preferences are nothing to do with age. I felt the same at 18. Purcell over the Who anytime. So I bought a harpsichord. In installments. I hardly dare admit it now, for fear of being thought a snotter. But nobody seemed to mind back then, and most of my friends embraced the new. They still do. Olga is mad keen on the Shard, the South Bank and anything huge, brutish and overwhelming, and Fielding is modern as anything.
“I’m more cutting-edge than you,” says he droning admiringly about Breaking Bad – he’s off to watch the box set. And I’m off to tinkle away at my black keyboard by candlelight. But we are still friends.
