Gushologists!

One week ago I was in the UK and coming to the end of a five week visit. Sitting in an hotel with my daughter we flicked channels and came across the Glastonbury Music Festival. The highlight was Elton John on the last evening. I cannot remember the names of the TV hosts at this iconic annual event but I know that I could never do their job. Indeed I find it hard to like and respect what they do. That is wrong of me because I know why they are paid and I know they do it well. Their job is to gush about every act no matter how weak and insipid it may be. They are not there to cast an hypercritical eye over all of the many acts and performances, just the opposite in fact. The floodgates must be open. We have to be inundated until we drown in a sea of over embellishment. I do get it. No host or MC is going to stand before the camera and say that Sir Elton John wasn’t performing as he did twenty years ago. Nobody is going to draw attention to the fact that the man in the gold suit was no longer skipping over the stage like he once did. We know that when we switch on we are going to experience gold tongued, honey-dripping, broad-smiling verbosity which is so highfalutin that it surpasses all reasoned logic. There is no higher point in the universe than all of the various Glastonbury musicians. None of them are bad. So we watch and we have self-doubt. Am I missing something here? Is there something which I am not intelligent enough to comprehend? My confidence takes a knock. My belief in my own arrogant perceptions suffers a blow.

But then I think through things and attempt to understand. Then I remember ‘great events’ and ‘wonderful sights’ which did not stand the test of time.

Clevedon in Somerset is the town in which I grew up after my family left Scotland. I was back there on this recent UK visit. The famed Lake Poets visited there in the 1800s. Coleridge, Wordsworth and Tennyson all made the visit. Poets Walk is a path over an headland that overlooks the Bristol Channel. Some of the street names are named for these poets. Indeed our first house there was on Hallam Road, named after Arthur Hallam.

Hallam was a poet and a contemporary and friend of Alfred Lord Tennyson. (He who wrote ‘Ulysses’ and “The Lady of Shallot” and much more besides before becoming Poet Laureate.) All of these famed poets wrote of Hallam in glowing terms, convincing everybody that he was the most brilliant of all of them. Destined to become a great man if not a great poet. Arthur Hallam died of a suspected stroke at the tender age of 22. So, of course, amidst their grief over his premature departure, they gushed about who he was and what he might have been. Friends, how often have we read about the Camelots of the past. The Kennedy presidency is often referred to as ‘Camelot’. The number of famed pop stars who have shrugged their coils at the age of 27 years, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix and so on. We have every reason to be impressed by what was achieved in their short lives and we do have the right to speculate about what they might have achieved had they lived longer. But, Dear Reader, we might consider the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War when we look back at Kennedy’s presidency. We may consider that the early demise of popular music icons meant that they had already achieved all that they might.

I will certainly gush about the achievements of family and friends but I trust that I am wise enough to understand that my enthusiasm for their achievements is based on my feelings and I cannot expect others to really share in them.

But those whose profession it is to try to convince us that we have never seen it’s like before, hopefully in their heart of hearts understand that we, the audience, may not be of the same mind; that by ramming roistering rambunctious pink ponies and rainbowed uplands down our throats it is a bit of an insult to our intelligence. I like to think that we, the great unwashed, can make up our own minds without the help of professional gushologists.  

I do want to gushily share the many wonderful experiences that I have had in Scotland and England over the past 35 days. I am not going so to do. Maybe when I am fully over my jet lag and regained some form of writing habit that is less boring that this particular pathetic post, then, Dear Friends, I will wax lyrical about what were great days in familiar haunts. But until then I hope that you are well and enjoying the season.

Oh, and if you are Canadian, Happy Canada Day, eh!