Cool Britannia

I was killing time in my car the other day while waiting for a meeting and began flipping through the pages of a book I’d picked up from the National Book Store bargain bin — Letters from London by Julian Barnes, whose breakthrough novel Flaubert’s Parrot we’d enjoyed in grad school 20 years ago — too long ago to remember the source of our enjoyment, so it was good to read him again. But this time this was Barnes writing as a nonfictionist — that cross-breed between a reporter and an essayist — on a number of subjects occasioned by his acceptance of an appointment as The New Yorker’s correspondent in London. “I was, in effect, to be a foreign correspondent in my own country,” he mused. “My predecessor as London correspondent, the novelist Mollie Panter-Downes, began filing in 1939 and held the job for nearly half a century.”

This led me to wonder why no Filipino newspaper or magazine of any worth employs novelists as correspondents in, say, Los Angeles or Tokyo; of course we don’t have too many novelists to begin with, and we haven’t much to pay them, but I suspect that the kind of nuanced reportage that Julian Barnes produces isn’t what most Filipino readers seem to be interested in.

There are Filipinos abroad who send in the occasional report on goings-on in the Pinoy community in Daly City or Chicago, usually involving some troubled movie star or some junketing government official. Even more common — I remember how endemic this was with one Manila newspaper — are the two- or three-column-inch updates on the professional progress of the sons and daughters of Binmaley, Pangasinan or Tagkawayan, Quezon in the Great American Frontier. But we rarely write and read extended, penetrating accounts of America or Europe or the Middle East as seen through the eyes of the Filipino, as though we lacked the distance or the credibility to do a good job of it, even if we have boldly gone everywhere on the planet. (Gregorio C. Brillantes and his travel essays provide a notable exception.)

The English, on the other hand, fuss over everything above their heads and beneath their feet. On my most recent visit to England for a writers’ conference devoted to nature, I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to nature writer Richard Mabey, whose training in philosophy seems to have little to do with but inevitably informs his love affair with beech trees, and angler Charles Rangeley-Wilson, whose search for trout in the Thames (an almost spiritual quest for signs of renewal in what had become one of the world’s most industrialized waterways) embodied a mini-essay on London’s buried rivers (now shadowed by the Tube’s labyrinthine network).

Julian Barnes’s reportage on English mores and manners is tack-sharp. No one takes the English more seriously than the English, but it’s a wry, self-mocking seriousness that quickly turns on itself — something that you probably need in a country with so much pomp and circumstance. Barnes goes around with a pin poised to deflate all that high seriousness, and you should hear the air leaving the balloon.

Scanning the table of contents, my eyes first fell (should I say naturally?) on an essay titled “Britannia’s New Bra Size,” a piece which begins as a report on the unlikely model chosen to represent Britannia — the quintessential, trident-wielding British warrior-queen — and proceeds to a learned disquisition on British philately, numismatics, and heraldry, then finally to a tart commentary on Thatcherite politics.

To come up with and agree on a new stamp featuring an updated Britannia, a design committee was formally constituted to fuss over everything. Thumbing his nose at a tradition that required a suitably glamorous model for the sitting Britannia (who began her iconic life as King Charles II’s mistress), artist Barry Craddock took the short cut and chose his wife to sit for him. But the controversy didn’t revolve around that decision.

“There was particular and earnest discussion of Britannia’s bra size…. Mike Denny of the Roundel Design Group explains: ‘Britannia must look powerful but she also has to be feminine. When we started out, her chest was almost flat, which looked ridiculous. Then we went to the other extreme. Eventually, we settled for a 36B size.’ This was at least democratic: 36B is currently the standard bust size of this nation, having crept up, Gossard the bra manufacturers confirm, from 34B seven years ago. The pill and better nutrition are held to be two contributing factors…. Barry Craddock remembers the moment when ‘a lady from the Post Office, Angela Reeves, took her pen and said it should be that big.’ He seems relieved that the final decision was not his: ‘A Standard 36B — they told me.’”

Such seriocomic touches permeate Barnes’s book, which I’m keeping in the car for those parking-lot or waiting-room reads that often put me in a more attentive state than if I were reading for a lecture or an exam.

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Speaking of London, I still feel bad that I didn’t have more than a few days (and more than a few pounds sterling) to spend there last June. I’d planned on seeing at least one play or musical at the West End or even in smaller theatres elsewhere. (I missed by just one day one of the bloodiest and also liveliest plays of the Elizabethan period, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and Brecht’s The Good Soul of Setzuan was playing somewhere, but I wouldn’t have minded watching Mamma Mia! or even The Sound of Music for some sing-along fun.) Alas, I was booked into a cheap hotel that earned its difference by being too far away for me to catch both a show and the last Tube train.

But fate lent a hand, and I discovered — strolling from Covent Garden into Leicester Square, the throbbing heart of the city — that I’d come into town just in time for a weekend of free excerpts presented by the very same performers who were going onstage that same night. Imagine a four-hour feast of the very best of Broadway and West End musicals (this being London, the event was called “West End Live”) — and all of that free in the park. I got to listen to the highlights of musicals I’d never have walked into — High School Musical, Avenue Q, and for me the afternoon’s piece de resistance, the London Gay Men’s Chorus (about 40 men of every size, shape, and age in plain oxford shirts and slacks) who brought the house down with “I Feel Pretty” (“… and witty, and gay!”). No greater sign, I thought, of London’s civility than the rousing reception accorded these guys.

With a burgundy-red 1935 Parker Vacumatic fountain pen that I’d found for a song earlier that morning on Portobello Road tucked safely in my inner pocket, I marched off to nearby Soho for a nine-pound Chinese buffet, and as I inhaled the fragrant steam off the pearly-white rice, I felt like I’d imbibed the best of London — a bit of the “Cool Britannia” of Tony Blair’s prime — for not very much.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.