The photo shoot

 

Subject: A Photo Shoot

One of the big selling points of the Tour de France is the stunning scenery and quaint towns of France as the riders roll through the countryside. Today I was watching the Tour of Britain as the riders cycle through our own countryside and was pleased to see how pleasant our country is outside the urban sprawl. The rolling farmlands and the lush tree lined lanes, the substantial houses and extensive gardens, the lush greenery  all made a deep impression.

The orderliness, the explicit substance of generations of cultivated living, the standards and the respect for rules and regulations which can make you proud to live in this well ordered country so long as you don’t become envious and imagine joining them. As the helicopter swoops along following the race, the equanimity of entrenched communities basking in their autonomy, soaked in their class dominated entitlement which ensures a civilised order, it’s all a far cry from the devastation we see on our television screens in other parts of the world.

Seen from a few hundred feet in the air, with the roads closed to traffic, life, stilled to a snapshot, far enough away from the conflict of Mr Greens hedge  obstructing the neighbours view or the sly comment in the pub over the rights of immigrants, everything is in aspic and is hunkydory

Sadly it’s a far cry from the turmoil of city life with its drugs and gangs, it’s crude excesses and debouched behaviour. It’s even further from the deprivation of societies in Africa the Middle East or on the Indian/Pakistan subcontinent. The chaotic living standards in overpopulated cities, the lack of everything, except people and noise, with the daily disruption of traffic and the disregard for another persons space. Those leafy lanes belong to a different world where politeness and curtesy are the hall mark of a civilised society which scarcely seems to notice. Apart from the cheering crowds as the race enters some suburban enclave there is no village celebration with orchestrated motifs of people in a field, patterned  in rotating circles to represent some agricultural aspect of their life  in the village. In France the community is at hand to celebrate and showcase their hamlet whilst in England the upper middle class, living in these houses wouldn’t want to be seen make a fuss, nothing so plebeian as sharing in the wider community. Culture is on display, the isolationist stiff upper lip which once upon a time administered a good part of the world wouldn’t want to fraternise  with ‘the natives’, either at home or abroad, it wouldn’t be pukka.