ANGELA MOLLARD
LONDON CALLING Now, more than ever, the home of Paddington Bear, red telephone boxes and double-decker buses needs our support. Don’t let recent events put you off
As you read this I’ll be touching down in London. I’m taking my girls — to catch up with family and friends, to enjoy those glorious long summer evenings, to revisit the streets where I spent the magical and maddening years of my 20s.
“Do you really think you should take the kids?” I’ve been asked at least half a dozen times.
“Of course,” I reply. “I’ve booked trapeze lessons in Regent’s Park, a high-speed boat ride up the Thames and we may even nip to Borough Market for lunch. Oh and I’m not leaving until I’ve had a glass of rose on the roof terrace at The Ned. It’s got a cracking view of St Paul’s Cathedral.”
Not once have I considered cancelling this trip. We’ve saved for months, I want to highfive my English godson as he graduates from primary school and I’m walking up Ivinghoe Beacon with a dear friend who has battled breast cancer in the five years since I saw her last.
Yet some bloke in the Fairfax press is telling me not to come. “Dear Aussies: don’t come to London for holidays,” writes David Monaghan, documenting how with “Brexit, blades and burning towers” Londoners are best left “to our own self-inflicted sufferings”.
Oh please. Notwithstanding that you should never listen to anyone guilty of such parlous use of alliteration, the last thing London needs right now is for tourists to desert it.
Monaghan claims London has lost its pluck, that the Grenfell Tower fire, the terrorist attacks and the ill-executed snap election has topped off a “year-long bonfire of tolerance, equality and empathy that followed the vote to leave the European Union”.
Monaghan, a Sydneysider who moved to London 27 years ago, is entitled to feel saddened by the bad fortune that’s descended on his beloved city.
Yet if he were a true Londoner he’d be inviting his former compatriots over for a pint or a cuppa instead of rounding out his handwringing polemic with a crack at Theresa May and her tougher approach to immigration.
“Go to Paris, and eat cake under the Arc de Triomphe,” he argues, waxing lyrical about the handsome Emmanuel Macron and clearly forgetting the terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice.
“England,” he continues, “must stare alone at its ashes until it figures if Australians, if any strangers, are welcome to the tower it has built.”
What overwrought nonsense. To avoid London at its most bloodied and broken is not only cowardly and playing straight into warped terrorist ideology, but is akin to kicking a mate when he’s down.
Britain may be in a pickle, but loyalty is at the heart of our shared history. To descend into superficial and binary arguments against immigration when a shaken world demands hearts and smarts is to undermine the boldness, unity and clarity we most need.
The fact is Britain, like many countries — France and America among them — is striving for a new kind of democracy because the old one doesn’t fit.
There is poverty and therefore the potential for a Grenfell tragedy in every developed city of the world, including Sydney and Melbourne.
Further, Brexit provoked a conversation that had to happen, with a string of nations — even New Zealand with its liberal policies — rethinking immigration. To live in the world is to accept the agitation at that tricky axis of people and ideas; without it we stagnate or, heaven forbid, become North Korea.
We must visit London just as we continued to go to Bali after the 2003 bombings. To shy away from any targeted city is a betrayal of those living through it. Allegiance, optimism, courage, grit and a sense of humour — for which the Brits are best in class — are our weapons against terrorism.
Besides, London will wake up each morning just as it always has, through wars and inclement weather and kings choosing to jack in the throne in favour of a mistress.
Even this week Prince Harry admitted no one in the royal family actually wants to be king or queen. But someone will do it. As Vera Lynn sang, there will always be an England. But just to be sure, I emailed my godson’s mum to check.
“Oh, gosh,” she said. “Of course you must come. We have the Countess of Wessex tumbling out of a carriage at Ascot and landing on the Duchess of Cambridge, we have the shipping forecast and Jersey Royals. We’ve just enjoyed a heatwave and everyone is secretly dying for it to be cloudy again so we can all go about our business and not worry about a hosepipe ban and our dahlias.”
Then she attached a clip of my godson singing at his last school assembly. It was adorable — the whole of Year 6 with their sweet British accents singing Green Day’s ‘Time Of Your Life’: “It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right, I hope you had the time of your life.”
London will carry on. And so will we.