On the day this week when Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds were celebrating their happy event, my wife and I received joyful news about our own baby boy. OK, he won’t thank me for describing him as such, since he’s 26 years old, going on 27. But as the youngest of our brood of four sons, our baby he will always be.
I know other parents will understand. The news that has lifted our hearts, after weeks of anxiety, is that Harry has been allocated a seat on one of the last two flights home from Bogota, Colombia, before a complete shutdown in air travel for the foreseeable future, ordered by that country’s president.
His flight, chartered by the Foreign Office to bring British nationals home, should touch down at Heathrow sometime on Saturday morning. All being well, I’ll be there to meet him and whisk him back to the family nest, where he hasn’t set foot since he flew off to Colombia ten months ago to teach English at the university under the auspices of the British Council.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson alongside his fiancee Carrie Symonds at the England v Wales, Guinness Six Nations, Rugby Union, Twickenham Stadium, London, UK – 07 Mar 2020
Sentimental To adapt the words of Dame Vera Lynn’s sentimental wartime song: ‘And Harry will go to sleep / In his own little room again…’ If you’d told me a few weeks ago that I’d go all gooey at the thought of having one of our boomerang-generation boys back on the premises, I’d have said you must be joking.
If you’d gone on to say his return might mean that, thanks to quarantine regulations, all three of us — he, my wife and I — would be forbidden to leave the house for a fortnight, even to walk the dog, I’d have said you were definitely nuts.
All right, I admit that I suffered a few pangs of Empty Nest Syndrome immediately after Harry left. But they passed in a flash, as Mrs U and I began to revel in the bliss of having the house to ourselves. No more piles of wet towels on the bathroom floor. No more furry fungus-covered slices of takeaway pizza turning up behind the sofa cushions.
No more battles over the remote control when the football was on and I wanted to watch an old movie. But it takes a crisis like the coronavirus outbreak to teach us where our hearts really lie. And when Harry rang via WhatsApp on Wednesday to tell us he had a seat on the flight, and to ask if there was any chance that we could put him up for a bit, I felt a surge of relief and happiness that took me quite by surprise.
I hope the boy’s mother will forgive me for revealing she was so happy and relieved that she burst into tears. I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but God bless the Foreign Office! In a way, of course, it made little difference whether Harry was on the other side of the world or somewhere in our home city of London, like his three brothers.
After all, we haven’t been allowed to see any of them in the flesh (though we’ve seen more of them all since the lockdown than before it, through the miracles of WhatsApp and Zoom). But as others in our position will testify, it feels very different indeed when we’re separated from those we love by an ocean and more than 5,000 miles.
Though his contract with the British Council and his university in Bogota expires this month, Harry was loving Colombia so much that he planned to stay on until the end of his work permit in July, making ends meet through the private teaching work he’s been doing since he arrived.
But learning English, alas, has been the last thing on most Colombians’ minds since their lockdown (much more rigorous than ours) began a few weeks ago. The poor boy has been trapped in his flat, without much prospect of an income, tormented by trainee opera singers practising their scales next door. His students tell him they can’t understand a word he’s saying over the internet.
Worse, he has been stuck in a country notorious — at least until recently — as one of the most volatile in Latin America, plagued by drug-related terrorism. Is there a parent in Britain, I ask you, who wouldn’t feel terribly uneasy about having a child in his predicament?
Dreadful What if something dreadful happened to him and we couldn’t fly out to help him? And what if his parents succumbed to this vile virus and he couldn’t come home to say goodbye? In my gloomier moments, I was beginning to wonder if we’d ever see him again.
True, Harry may think the £800 he’s had to pay for his Foreign Office flight is a king’s ransom. But I’d cheerfully have paid double to have him home. My only point, I suppose, is that even with so much on its plate, the Government mustn’t give up on its struggle to reunite families.
Death and bereavement have been inevitable facts of life since the dawn of time, long before Covid-19 came along. But enforced separation from those we love is downright cruel. I reserve the right to change my mind when I next find a mouldy slice of pizza lodged between the cushions on the sofa. But, for the moment at least, I rejoice.
There’s so much else to moan about during the lockdown that you may well think I’ve lost all sense of perspective. But why, in the name of all that’s sacred, has the BBC chosen a poem by the Birmingham-born American Edgar Guest (1881-1959) to accompany its latest corporate advertisement, creepily entitled Bringing Us Closer?
And why did that fine actor, Idris Elba, agree to humiliate himself by reciting it? Ours is the land that gave the world Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Kipling, Auden and Betjeman.
What on Earth possessed Auntie to pick Guest — surely the worst ‘poet’ ever to make a living from banal, tone-deaf doggerel — as the wordsmith who best expressed the nation’s feelings? Think of Pam Ayres, stripped of all the humour and wordplay that give her work its immense charm.
To show what I mean, here are a few examples of guest’s contorted quests for a rhyme, taken from the BBC’s patronising ad: ‘When the funds are low and the debts are high/And you want to smile but you have to sigh…’ ‘Life is strange with its twists and turns/As every one of us sometimes learns…’
‘Don’t give up though the pace seems slow/You may succeed with another blow.’ Why ‘blow’? If he was stuck for a rhyme, as he clearly was, wouldn’t ‘go’ have done the job better?
Enough to say that I’m right behind the New York wit Dorothy Parker, when she wrote the immortal couplet: ‘I’d rather flunk my Wassermann Test/ Than read a poem by Edgar Guest.’ The Wassermann Test, if like me you didn’t know, is a test for syphilis.