By Lydia Unsworth
There are flags all over the high street. Union Jacks, St George’s flags, and ones printed with text such as VE Day and VJ Day. This is not a celebration, I explain to my daughter, quietly, on the walk to school. This is not a jubilee or a coronation. I say this flag’s worse than that one, but that one isn’t great either. I say, the flagpoles coming out of the buildings have been there for a long time on this high street, like when the marathon ran past our old house in the Netherlands and when we bought it the old owners said here is the original house number and here is the flag for the flagpole. I say it isn’t like that, or rather the memory of that; it’s something a little more sinister. I say a lot of people are sad and a lot of people are angry. A lot of people want to live in this village, this suburb, this section of underfunded conurbation but they aren’t being looked after, and like when you hit your brother or call him out because you feel he’s getting preferential treatment, like when you say you don’t want to play the game anymore and I go on playing with him, so you stick your feet into the game and scream that you aren’t playing and I’m playing the game with him without you and everything is awful and you are alone, and we didn’t want that to happen, we wanted to play with you too, but now somehow we’re all crying and being rude to each other, that’s how it is a bit, but the difference is no one is trying to play with certain towns, not really, not the people that should be. I say don’t tell your teachers I said the flag is racist, because it’s much more complicated, other people in other countries are waving other flags, and that waving looks to us from here like it feels triumphant and like they, collectively, have escaped something bad, and we want a part of that, that feeling, to be a collective, I think we do, however we might choose sometimes to go about it, trying to escape the neglect of the towns around these flagpoles and around these lampposts and bridges and roundabouts that have all become flagpoles. We want to be victors, gleeful. Who doesn’t want to be a victor? It is important to remember that some people waving the flag around are otherwise really nice and have just got caught up in the fact that things don’t feel the way they used to. And they want their town, their bit of road between two larger, yet also deteriorating places, to have shops that are open, that sell vegetables you can ponder over, they want to say hello in the chippy, but you stand there now and the orders are coming in from outside, the man stands over you with his wet hood and his electronic device that needs an electronic signature, and the owner is shouting because everything’s happening in the wrong order, and the customers are stranded because, from the outside, when they entered, when they made this choice, they thought they were next in line, and when they go to the supermarket, the tomatoes grow fur before they get home, the raspberries congeal before they get home, the peaches collapse before they get home, but the prices are competitive and the location’s tremendous, of the supermarket, the supermarket, and we’re supposed to be grateful for that.
