I’m very much a creature of habit. When I go to the British Library I almost always bring in a cheese sandwich, then at lunchtime go and buy an accompanying bag of crisps, a can of ginger beer and a cup of miso soup from the Pret-a-manger over the road. (I like Pret a lot – the people there seem not to hate your guts, and to quite enjoy their jobs, which is cheering.) Then I go and eat in the little semi-enclosed circular area in the library forecourt. It’s usually nice and quiet there, and I can chew over my failures and disappointments in peace. The only irritation is that there are a series of stunted pillars around the circumference, each topped with singularly inept statuary. These works of art consist of crudely carved human figures apparently copulating with large lumps of rock - of all forms of copulation, surely the least satisfactory. Still, it’s a small price to pay for relative seclusion. You can imagine my alarm, therefore, when, today, I found the circular area filled with high-spirited French teenagers. They played bongo drums, fooled around, laughed, joked and enjoyed themselves in quite inappropriate ways, totally ignoring my tuts and disapproving looks. Then they started to sing ‘Happy Birthday’, not in French, but in English. This made me wonder if all cultures sing ‘Happy Birthday in English – Inuit in their igloos, Highland Papuans in their huts, etc etc. And then I realised that in thousands of years time, when English is forgotten and the world speaks some other language, derived perhaps from one of the Polynesian dialects, or a version of Gaelic, that maybe people will still sing the words to Happy Birthday, without knowing what they mean. And I’m not sure why, but that cheered me up, a bit.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 12:11:57 +0000
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