A journey back in time to a lost England we never knew
Maybe it’s an age thing. Confirmation that I’ve left youth behind, and am now marching, with only a slight twinge in the right knee, towards the golden autumn of my later years. There has to be some explanation. Because I’ve grown unexpectedly fascinated by model railways.
It’s odd. I’ve never been a trainspotter. But my son, as is the way of three-year-olds, is train-mad, and so at weekends we’ve started taking him to little exhibitions of model railways, in school or village halls around Kent. And it turns out I love them. In fact, I suspect I love them more than he does.
But what I’ve realised, as I watch the miniature locomotives whirring round the bends of track, is that the appeal of model railways has little to do with trains. What really matters is the scenery they run through.
The painstakingly fashioned trees and hedgerows and riverbanks and duck ponds, the windmills and villages, the omnibuses and traction engines, the minuscule men all wearing hats, the tiny plastic schoolboys fishing in the stream… These are what model railways are about. Hardly any depict the world as it is today. Almost all are visions of a lost England: an England before Beeching, before the Second World War, or even, some of them, before the First World War. An England of Rupert Brooke, or Rupert Bear. An England the modellers themselves, old as they may be, are too young to have known.
For both modeller and viewer, these little landscapes are a retreat: a retreat from the now, and its endless bewildering frenzy of change. Here are scenes of perfect fect pastoral serenity, unmolested by reality, cloudless as a childhoodod summer: a beautiful, sunlit unlit stasis. You can almost hear the birdsong, smell the ploughed oughed fields. How soothing they hey are. I could look at them m all day.
Me, my son, and a handful of middle-agedd men, gathered round in n silence, gazing into thee past. All that chatter aboutbout war over Gibraltar r seems to have died down. wn. Thank goodness for that. at. It would have left us in naa terrible conundrum.
Think about it. Bothh Britain and Spain are members of Nato. And the terms of Nato dictate that, if a member is attacked, all the other members are obliged to defend it. Which would mean that, if we bombed Spain, we’d then have to bomb ourselves. And we wouldn’t be the only ones. In defence of Spain, all t the other Nato countries would havehav to bomb us, too. And then, in de defence of us, bomb themselves. But, of course, b by bombing themselves, they’d be bombing a Nato member. WhichWhi would mean they’d have tot bomb themselves again, tot punish themselves for bombing themselve themselves. While, at the same ti time, bombing all the others to punishpunis them for bom bombing all the others.othe It would be relentless.rele Nato has 28 members, includinginc the US, Canada,Ca Germany,Ge France andan Italy. And all of t them would be legallylega required to wage war both with each o other and themselves. On and on it would go – until the whole of Western democracy lay in ruins.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this was Vladimir Putin’s plan all along. Jeremy Corbyn says the media give him a raw deal. His supporters evidently agree. On Thursday, a group of them picketed the offices of the worst offender.
It wasn’t the Mail. It wasn’t the Sun. It wasn’t the Express.
It was the New Statesman, Britain’s leading Left-wing magazine.
A week earlier, the New Statesman had ventured to suggest that the Labour Party was in less than ideal shape to win an election, and that one possible solution might be a change of leadership. A London branch of Momentum, the Jeremy Corbyn supporters’ group, duly organised a public protest against this appalling display of imperialist neoliberal bias, and arrived at the magazine’s HQ brandishing placards that read “WANTED: HONEST JOURNALISM”, and “WITH THIS KIND OF NEW STATESMAN, WHO NEEDS MURDOCH!” The editor, they demanded, must grant them control over 30 of the magazine’s 64 pages, which they would fill with unbiased, i.e. pro-Corbyn, articles.
A New Statesman journalist bravely approached the protesters and attempted to calm the situation by offering them some biscuits. The first protester declined. The second snatched the packet from his hand, grabbed a microphone, and, holding aloft the biscuits for all to see, warned her scandalised comrades that a capitalist journalist was attempting to buy them off.
Heroically they resisted the lure of these traitorous comestibles, and carried on protesting.
I gather that the New Statesman’s editor intends to resist their demands. I think he’s mistaken. Left-wing or not, his magazine is a business, and he can hardly expect to make money by telling his readers what they don’t want to hear.
If I were editor of the New Statesman, I wouldn’t simply publish articles that were favourable to Mr Corbyn. I’d announce on the front cover that Mr Corbyn was now prime minister, and that on his first day in office he had summarily ended injustice, poverty and war. Inside, I would reveal that the hated mainstream media were engaged in a disgusting conspiracy to trick the masses into thinking Mr Corbyn was merely Leader of the Opposition. Any TV news footage that appeared to show Theresa May entering 10 Downing Street, I would disclose, had in fact been mocked up in a studio. Any suggestion that injustice, poverty and war still existed, meanwhile, was a cynical lie, put about to make it seem as if the vile Tories remained in power.
I can picture my inbox already. “At last! Honest, objective, unbiased reporting. Keep up the good work.”