Remember

For a nation that frequently declares itself conservative in its tastes when it comes to matters of art, there’s nobody quite like the British when it comes to bestowing ‘beloved’ status on what appears to be a challenging piece of art.

If you looked at top tens and public polls, you’d probably conclude that the nation’s favourite artwork was either ‘The Haywain’ or ‘The Fighting Temeraire’.  And the first clue about just how unconservative the Brits really are is there, because whilst the former is a traditional and bucolic scene, it’s more usually photoshopped to show what it will look like with a windfarm in the background than it is seen in its original state these days, and the latter is both an impressionist masterpiece and a melancholy statement of declining power.

In the analogue age, you could guess the nations favourite art by the number of reproductions of images sold.  That’s why it’s fairly certain that up to a few years ago, the nation’s most beloved artwork was either that tennis playing bird scratching her arse, or ‘The Singing Butler’.

Recently, the best gauge of the popularity of an image has how many times it is reproduced in media.  Judging by the number of times the same picture has appeared on television and in print recently, the nation’s favourite image would appear to be a gurning twat with a pint in one hand and fag in the other photographed in a pub the morning after a by-election.

Until this week.

The British really do embrace the new.  Apparently, originally, it took some convincing by a lone Gateshead councillor to persuade everyone that ‘The Angel of the North’ was going to be sensational.  Now we can’t imagine Britain without it.  It was probably the same when one lone crazy druid was trying to convince everyone that a stone circle on Salisbury Plain would be really cool.  This is the country that produced the YBAs, who may be on their way to being OAPBAs but without doubt had an impact on public taste.

Which brings us to the poppies at the Tower of London.

What brought me to the poppies at the Tower of London was a taxi.  I’d always intended to visit them as close to 11 September as possible, when the moat would be full of poppies and the installation would be complete, before being (rightly) dismantled.

888,246 ceramic poppies fill the moat, one for every British and commonwealth soldier killed in the Great War, a war where my Grandfather took a German sniper bullet in his open mouth and out his cheek (interesting scar) and where, stretchered into a field hospital, he was looked after by his own brother, a medic, who apparently gave him his own medal for bravery explaining ‘you deserve this more than I’.
In the taxi, the traffic ground to a halt around the Tower.  London traffic (taxis, busses, white vans) was slowly supplanted by coaches and people, people people.

We bailed out early and walked the last stretch.  The last time I was in a crowd like this was the Olympics, where you have people walking towards something, in that case the Stadium, with a sense of expectation and people walking away from it with a look on their faces that meant they would never be quite the same again.  So it was here.

The crowd.  The Crowd.  The crowd are as much a part of the installation as the poppies.  Quiet, respectful, immense.  There’s no pushing or shoving, there are only a couple of people in hi-viz anoraks and even they just stand there.  Everybody just sort of knows.

Then you see the moat, a river of blood pouring from the windows of the Tower and, because it’s not Armistice Day yet, volunteers still planting.  Another poppy hammered in, another life snuffed out.

And it’s right that it should go.

Never mind that people have already bought their poppies, that’s not the point.  The point is that the impermanence reflects the frailty of life, that it is special because it is temporary and because it teaches us to cherish precious, fragile things that are not forever.

It’s extraordinary, humbling, marvellous and magnificent.