A couple of weeks ago my seven-year-old came skipping out of school calling “Mummy! Mummy! I have exciting news!”
He does this quite often, always skipping, and I very much enjoy his exciting news items: he was picked to be class line-leader, or to help on a school poster; once it was that his friend S had made puppets in school and was going to put on a show for his parents that evening.
It’s a useful reminder for a parent ground down by the excess of dreary and/or soul-crushing news we have been surviving through since at least 2020 – the story that the grown-up world has anointed to be its main obsession of the day is not necessarily meaningful or important in other people’s perspectives.
This time, the seven-year-old’s exciting news was that the gala king and queen had been announced in the school assembly (I think the names are picked out of a hat, which already makes it 1000% more democratic and fair than the newest Tory honours list).
He is a big fan of significant holidays – last year, I came downstairs on the morning of pancake day and he had created pancake bunting out of scrap paper and brown felt tips – and our village gala day is up there with Christmas and even Halloween for him.
The most important thing about the news was that the primary six boy chosen as this year’s gala king was H, my friend’s son and also our youngest child’s assigned buddy when he starts school in August.
I grew up in an arid suburb with very few other children about. I attended Brownies and the occasional coffee morning jumble sale in the local church hall, but there was no sort of gathering place, no hub or day for a community to gather around.
Occasionally, we would drive through the neighbouring mining towns my mum worked in and I’d see houses decked out with flowers spelling a girl’s name, bunting hanging from lampposts and ask why – ah, it must be Gala Day; that must be the Gala Queen’s house, I’d be told.
The colour and celebration of my community is a world away from the one I grew up in
The colour and celebration of it all was a world away from my staid street where the closest I’d ever got to community was having Mr Baxter next door shout at me for wrecking his hedge.
It feels right to me that my kids have grown up surrounded by community, that they take it for granted.
Both of them high-five strange (to me) older children in the street or at the playpark, know them by name. They are growing up enmeshed, despite their incomer parents.
Gala day comes with its own long-held traditions: mainly the themed fancy-dress parade through the village, led by a band and the gala king and queen in an open-top car, which ends in the park with a crowning.
There are no more official duties for either monarch than that (the Gala Queen changed into her football strip for the rest of the day shortly afterwards), but the fame lives on.
One of the primary two mums in the parade blushed when reminded that she had been the Gala Queen a couple of decades earlier and I felt a bit of residual glamour from just walking beside her.
My sons were absolutely fizzing with excitement at their tenuous personal connection to the slightly uncomfortable-looking eleven-year-old in a crown; it is now their dearest ambition to succeed him.
Our house is on the parade route, and that comes with responsibilities; one of the organising committee had sidled up to me during school pick-up and wondered whether/when I was intending to decorate our windows.
So we spent Friday night, while seemingly most of the country was tuned into the latest instalment of The Boris Johnson Show, drawing centipedes and ladybirds around the cut-out letters HAIL KING H___ (this year’s fancy dress theme was bugs) and enjoying the colours of the street bunting waving in the breeze outside the window.
The news can be exhausting and grey
I checked in briefly with the official news on Saturday morning, but it felt exhausting, grey and a million miles away from the noise of a community beginning to gather that I could hear outside my door.
Down in the park, once we’d followed the beat of the drums through the streets together, there were the same pleasures as there usually are: silent discos, dog shows, wrestling matches, bouncy castles, bottle stalls and passing jokes with people I’ve been living alongside for almost a decade.
I don’t know if it comes of having lived in a small and therefore involved community for the last eight years, of having children, of being drained by the current political soap opera or having finally accepted my individual powerlessness to affect any sort of political change in this country, but I made a little decision to myself this weekend, wandering round the local park in the sunshine.
I’m turning my head away from the grown-up news for a while. I’m going to try and stay local, where the community blooms and the exciting news happens.
Kirstin Innes is the author of the novels Scabby Queen and Fishnet, and co-author of non-fiction book Brickwork: A Biography of the Arches
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