I’ve always been suspicious of the word “community”: it conjures up visions of self-important, self-elected “leaders” blaming the rest of us for the bad behaviour of minorities, or busybody do-gooders lobbying the council to waste other people’s rates on their own pet obsessions.
It’s also used to lend spurious legitimacy to the claims of special interest groups – the gay “community”, the Muslim “community”, the cycling “community etc. – to be treated differently to the rest of us.
However, at least one sense of the phrase “local community” is beginning to make sense to me.
In my younger days, I enjoyed the anonymity of a Central London flat in a tourist hot-spot: I relished the fact that I rarely saw the same people from one day to the next. Although I wasn’t up to anything particularly reprehensible, I liked the fact that on the whole my neighbours didn’t have a clue who I was or what I was up to.
Until a couple of years ago, I was dying to escape London and disappear off to the wilds of Cornwall, as far away from neighbours as possible - especially noisy ones.
Living in the same West London suburb for 22 years, the influence of my wife, a thriving local church, and, no doubt, age, have finally conspired to change my outlook.
The sense of “community” that doesn’t get up my nose implies a network of connections to other people, businesses and the local environment which becomes stronger over time to form a framework which gives meaning, comfort and support to the existence of those within it.
A bit nebulous, of course, but a description of the past couple of days might flesh it out.
On Sunday we attended church, where there was standing-room only for the baptism of our vicar’s six-week old daughter. My wife was paid for one of the “special occasion” cakes she makes (they’re superb, by the way). The choir was in particularly good form, especially on Geoffrey Burgon’s Nunc Dimittis, which oldsters may remember as the theme tune to the BBC’s television serialisation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
In the afternoon, we visited a freezing Richmond Park and strolled around the lovely Isabella Plantation, and watched people feeding a splendid range of multi-coloured ducks. Afterwards, covered in mud, we hung around admiring some antlered deer. Then home for cinnamon toast and some folderol on TV.
Today – after our paperboy, milkman and dustbinmen had all done their bit – we drove to Chiswick House grounds to enjoy the last of the unexpected overnight frosting of snow. We watched swans and coots waddle, slightly mystified, over the surface of the ice-bound lake, and flurries of dogs yapping happily through the chill undergrowth, and wondered what had happened to the terrapins who used to sun themselves on a fallen tree that sloped down into the water, but which has now been removed.
Then lunch at the new café in the grounds, which opened today. We’ll miss the dilapidated 1930s original, with its dogs sleeping in the corner, staff straight out of a 1950s black and white film set in the East End – all cheerfulness, bustle, and sharp wits - and the invariably excellent meat, fish and pasta dishes at weekends. Did anyone with a dog or a child in Chiswick not visit it at some stage? And could anyone not have loved it?
While the new one might not have the quirky, unexpected charm of the original, the grub is good, the staff pleasant and the prices reasonable. First impressions suggest it’ll do.
During lunch, we were approached by my accountant’s wife, who has acted as a sort of unpaid agent for my wife’s cake-decorating skills, and the lady who runs our local poetry-reading group at the Oxfam bookshop (I’m thinking of an Ernest Dowson for this month’s evening session).
Followed by a stroll home under a sparkling blue sky via the local shops.
Now that strikes me as living in a community. Bourgeois, unchallenging, full of small, familiar, comforting pleasures and rituals, and people who know something – but not too much - about us, and who, if needed, would no doubt willingly come to our aid. It used to be a human and physical landscape I’d walk through: now it’s a genuine community to which I belong.
And I’m very glad that I do.
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