I saw Sinéad O’Connor’s final gig of her current tour a couple of weeks ago at the Apollo Theatre in Hammersmith. Walking down the rear exit stairwell afterwards, I listened to a conversation between three well-spoken English women, one of whom had apparently not previously been a fan.
“Actually, I thought she was rather good. Yes, super. Really quite good indeed. Yes, that was very… good.”
As I wandered back to the car, I reflected on how someone with such an apparently limited critical or emotional vocabulary might have experienced the concert. Not that I’m claiming any extraordinary powers of empathy or insight for myself, but I had found Sinéad’s performance to be alternately moving and breathtaking. What had my stair-walker made of it, I wondered. Pretty tunes? Lovely fiddle? Jolly impressive voice?
We all experience the world in different ways, as I was reminded at the weekend. I went to a rugby match on Sunday, persuaded only by the fact that the teams were composed of six-year-old peers to Nephew #1 rather than fully-grown men with beer bellies and broken noses. Nevertheless, the latter were there in abundance, standing on the sidelines, screaming “g’wan moi san” at their offspring.
They were animated and passionate and I could tell that this meant something to them that was considerably greater than the sum of its parts. For me, it was just a big field, a lot of intent-looking kids in cute stripy shirts and some oddly-shaped balls. I watched Nephew #1′s team playing and although I could see the art, I couldn’t feel it. A boy scored a try and I clapped loudly. Well done, that man! Well played! Really quite good indeed!
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On September 11th last year there was a documentary on ITV by Roger Graef, following the lives of a few people who had lost family members th epreviou syears. One family were frightfully frightfully in the way they spoke. They held a memorial service for their son. An elderly-ish gent came to participate,a nd greeted the mother with the, to my mind unforgettable, line “Whaaaat can one say?”
Without going into a rant about certain aspects of the British Education system, I think perhaps too many people are taught to bottle up their emotion, that is un-genteel to express anything other than a measured equilibrium.