wasn't some mad VE-Day street conga in Cheshire a Covid-superspreader event at the end of the first lockdown in June 2020?
These weird 1945 cosplay events, staged by people who weren't even born then and who were supposed to rebel against their parents and that that whole WW2 sacrifice generation in the late 1960s, are just wild.
I can remember military anniversaries (Remembrance Day) being marked solemnly as late as the early 90s and, at that time, not really discussed otherwise. The people who actually lived through it seemed quite content to forget a dark and horrible period of their lives, and take quiet solace in what had come afterwards.
Now we have a generation who do their best to pretend they were there when WW2 happened or at least that they have a right to be offended when people ignore it & the instituions that used to be of much more interest, like the Royal Family. I hope when the current Queen dies the whole loathsome, taxpayer draining institution is consigned to the historical wastebin, where it should have remained in the seventeenth century. Similarly I think there's some point to Remembrance Sunday but ludicrous nonsense like cosplaying VE Day celebrations and trundling the one serviceable Lancaster over Lincoln Cathedral every year should be scrapped.
England will never re-discover its marbles as long as it lives in an imagined past, a sickly mixture of Merchant Ivory, Barbara Windsor and Arthur Lowe, as a means of avoiding the present.
www.independent.co.uk
