Come the Renaissance

Lost: one spring and one livelihood. Gained: home plumbing skills and addiction to self-analysis

Kit Hesketh-harvey escapes his church and salutes the Arts

I’VE escaped from the Abbey. Am I skipping up the drive back to the house, swinging my guitar case and trilling I Have Confidence in Me? Not so much. Bit more Fidelio, if I’m honest: creeping, wan, unshaven, shielding my eyes from the unfamiliar sun.

Course, all those pictures of that VE Day didn’t help. My End of Lockdown involved no snogging of uniformed Wrens in a sea of joyous humanity. Instead, I tolled the bell one funereal Friday. But I’m fine. I went to boarding school. I’m used to that exeat awkwardness, where everybody has static on their connections, as if one’s synapses are faulty after a minor stroke.

The songwriters Maltby and Shire, in a seminar in Adelaide I once attended, mourned the 24 hours they’d lost, Somewhere Over the Dateline. I’ve lost a whole spring. What used to be not unfamiliar now looks unfamiliar.

Our village of 1,000 souls has, deo gracias, dodged the Reaper, but nothing else has. Gardens are immaculate, new fences spanking, lawns shorn close—and in stripes! Pollock has squirted Chrome Green all over a Constable. In the countryside, everything is rioting, just like everyone’s hair.

The crisis is passing. That said, we’ve all become alcoholics, and chain-smokers, too, as no one has actually disproved that thing about nicotine slowing infection. Oh, and we’re probably in for a slew of divorces.

Ionce taught creative writing in HMP Norwich. One lad’s poem described the roundabout outside the prison gates. You go round it, and head straight back in, because prison is the only thing you now understand.

What have I learned from my lock-up? Home plumbing, I suppose, and home earsyringing—not so different. I seem to have developed an unhealthy addiction to web psychotherapy (‘10 Signs That You’re…’). Apparently, I suffer from both overt and covert narcissistic personality disorder and I’m a co-dependent to boot.

Then I did it on Trump, just for fun. A textbook overt! And, eureka! I’ve got it! the whole developed West, too: we’ve all colluded, to become one gigantic narcissist. Now, Covid-19 has cut off our fix. The Last Trump sounds: sheikhs rattle and roll as oil collapses, Emperor Putin’s new clothes are ripped away.

Vultures may still circle the carrion— Brazil is ramping up deforestation, China is playing grandmother’s footsteps, Rachman landlords are extorting lockdown students —but they are all co-morbidities. Their erstwhile narcissistic suppliers—the sweatshop workers, the Filipino crew members, the environmentalists—have emerged as I have, into the light.

One property vulture is, however, pecking at the wounded Stables at Wavendon. This sacred jazz venue, in Johnny and Cleo Dankworth’s Bedfordshire garden, in which I have often sung, is, as is every Arts venue in the land, facing mortal starvation. He won’t prevail, however, not in the final reckoning.

Come the next pandemic, attend to the artists, who understand the true value of human life

You see, the Black Death—of one-third of the global population—resulted in the Renaissance, toppling the bullies through humanitarianism. The 1919 influenza pandemic cleared the way for the most vigorous revolution across the performing arts— and politics, psychology, literature—since that Renaissance.

Even this week, an online tribute to my beloved teacher, Stephen Sondheim, triumphed over isolation. Singing into an iphone merely intensifies the wisdom of the song that defines Sondheim’s manifesto. How I’d love to hear Cleo’s daughter, Jacqui, sing it! ‘Children, and Art’—they’re all that ultimately endure. They heal the pain of loss, however cruel.

Follow the economy? Airlines still collapse. Follow the science? In which 100% are forced to deny their humanity in order to save 0.5%, merely protracting the inevitable. I howled when polyamorous Prof Ferguson was hoist with his own petard. Human beings are more than statistics. How could he ever have imagined that he could stop relations, lovers, friends from contact for an entire year? He couldn’t manage a month.

Come the next pandemic—and it will come —attend to the artists, who understand the true value of human life. Not to the rulers, who use our genuine gratitude to the frontliners to distract us as they quietly subjugate. Not to the self-promoters, who refuse to admit that scientific knowledge is not absolute, but evolving. As for the time being: allow the young to build their own renaissance.

Like almost all this nation’s artists, like every other small businessman, I have lost my livelihood. (Other, that is, than this final bulletin; COUNTRY LIFE, one of the last defenders of liberty, continues courageously to do so, simply by carrying on.)

Nevertheless, I, as have most of you, have had it easy: a comfortable house, well away from the cities, and a large garden. I even had a private church. Contemplating that church, now through my bedroom window, I have learned one thing.

We cannot allow the have-nots to be punished yet more savagely as a result of all this. We have to grab back, and quickly, the rights that it took our island a millennium to win and a week to surrender. The price of this freedom is eternal vigilance.

Can we go to the beach? I’m 90. Haven’t much time. Don’t want to waste it. Or force the young people to waste it on my account.’ ‘Yeah, we can go to the beach, Dad.’ Children, art and humanity.