Dignity
'Respectable' ladies of Grantham
Welcome to Lost Diaries. The following is part of a series of Sketches featuring fleeting exercises in curiosity from places far and wide. This one is from the Lincolnshire town of Grantham. For more meandering reads, try my Travel Journal.
“He saved my life he did. Jesus is a good guy,” says the man in the slept-in jacket, beer can at his side, mustering cheery confidence as he sways down the pavement past a pair of textbook ‘respectable ladies’ advertising the merits of Christian prayer. He needs more than just a shave. (But so do I.)
“Oh, excellent,” comes the half-baked reply. There’s an air of the W.I. about them, chatting softly with their painted placard beside the congested town traffic at 9am on a grey Monday morning. Fortunately for them, outreach doesn’t seem to require reaching out. Merely bystanding, standing by, just in case. They return to their conversation as the man continues his journey to nowhere.
On a community noticeboard, a local charity (“Your Catalyst For Unlocking Social Capital”) has outlined its grant-approved vision of corporate friendliness in comic sans, with a cartoon bee announcing an enterprising calendar of cuppas, hubs, chats, meets, quizzes and general informality. It’s not my idea of social fabric, but at least it’s earnest. At least it’s real.
Over the road, the broken eggs and spray paint have been removed from Britain’s first female Prime Minister1. Margaret Thatcher’s 10ft statue, displaying her robes of peerage, attempts to embody a kind of dignity in an age when the word makes us queasy. Here in the UK, we have come to mistrust the stiff, practised dignity of statehood, preferring the inherent universal dignity that we attempt to see within every human soul we no longer believe in. It’s one of the more useful constructs of the Age of Reason. (Because hate and love are not reasonable.)
The Iron Lady was right about one thing, if we consider beyond the opening soundbite:
“There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women and people, and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.”
I’m no expert on Margaret Thatcher and claim no political allegiance, but I know that mentioning her name here without also insisting that she was some form of Satanic hag will already have lost me some readers. Oh well.