The Proms

I attended the Last Night of the Proms in Hyde Park on 11 September 2010. The Proms were something I’d known about forever, but I have no conscious memory of becoming aware of them. I have no memory of my parents watching them, and because they would have been screened by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, it is very doubtful my grandparents would have ever watched even though they are precisely the type of thing my grandmother would have loved.

As an adult I have watched the Last Night in the past. I don’t mark the date in my diary, or regard it as “must watch TV”, but if it’s on I won’t turn away from it. I know most of the rituals of that last performance of the season. The costumes people wear. The flags and the bunting. The singing along to Jerusalem, Pomp and Circumstance (aka Land of Hope and Glory), Rule Britannia and God Save the Queen.

My mate @nimbos goes. A bunch of us decided to join him this year, and I suspect it won’t be our last time. We all had such a fantastically good time I can see the addiction. It’s not necessarily the music, or the acts, but the amazingly relaxed nature of the crowd. It’s a picnic in Hyde Park, where you can bring alcohol, and you get wonderful entertainment by amazingly diverse acts.

Intellectually, it’s something I should hate. On paper, it’s jingoistic nationalism gone nuts. However, there’s a sense of the ridiculous about it, and people from other countries turn up to wave their flags, too. I got into an interesting Twitter conversation in Dutch with a chap in the Netherlands who was following it on the TV and via the Twitter stream. He told me he wished the Dutch had something similar, I told him I thought Koninginnedag (Queen’s Day) is the equivalent. I enjoy that, too, for similar reasons as this Last Night of the Proms. Yes, they are nationalism and flag waving, but the way I’ve experienced both they are celebrations, with an air of self-deprecation that’s hard to pin down.

The flag in the picture above is the Royal Standard. We were the only ones in the Park with it, which made it handy to point out and to find in the BBC coverage of the event. It belongs to @nimbos, which did not surprise, but what did was how many Brits present who had no clue as to what it was. I'm not really sure what that quite means...