I should confess at the outset that I went to Caldecott Square on Tuesday with every intention of being unmoved.
This is, after all, my particular talent — the quiet observation of mass enthusiasm from a position of gentle scepticism. I have attended parades before. I have written about the curious human compulsion to stand in the cold for hours in order to watch other people ride slowly past on a decorated vehicle. I wrote, only yesterday, about the virtue of standing in the cold. I believed I was inoculated.
I was not inoculated.
The sound that rose from Caldecott Square when Sully Marsh lifted the Merchants’ Cup above his head — that sound is not something I can render adequately in prose, though I have spent the better part of the evening trying. It was not a cheer, exactly. A cheer is what happens when a goal is scored or a toast is raised. This was something older and larger. It came up from the cobblestones. It came from forty thousand throats and seemed to carry the weight of every frustration, every anxiety, every argument about copper prices and insurance premiums and whether the city can afford its own ambitions. For perhaps eight seconds, Bobington forgot all of it, and simply roared.
I will admit that I roared with it.
I had stationed myself near the fountain at the south end of the square — the same fountain from which, I am told, a young man was later extracted by the Constabulary for having scaled it in a state of advanced celebration. My position offered a tolerable view of the makeshift stage where the Mayor would present the Freedom of the City, and a superior view of the crowd itself, which was what I had come to observe.
A crowd of this size — two hundred thousand, the Constabulary say, though how one counts such a thing with precision I cannot imagine — ceases to be a collection of individuals. It becomes a kind of weather. It has fronts and pressures, sudden gusts of energy that move through it like wind through wheat. When the open-top tram first appeared at the far end of Threadneedle Street, a tremor passed through the square that was almost geological.
Beside me stood a woman of perhaps seventy, neatly dressed in a wool coat that had seen better decades, with a scarlet scarf knotted at her throat. She carried a small cardboard sign that read, in careful hand-lettering: “ROVERS SINCE 1962.”
“Were you at the last parade?” I asked, meaning 2015.
“I was at the one before that,” she said. “1987. My husband took me. He’s been gone twelve years.”
She said nothing more. When Sully Marsh’s voice broke during his speech — when that great, stoic man wiped his eyes with the back of his glove and said “I don’t have the words” — the woman beside me pressed her hand to her mouth and wept silently. I looked away, because some things are private even in a crowd of two hundred thousand.
There is a school of thought, popular among the more austere commentators, that a cup parade is a frivolity — bread and circuses for a city that ought to be focused on more serious matters. The copper crisis. The Kaelmar Strait. The Greystone investigation. The tramway budget. God knows there is no shortage of serious matters; this newspaper is thick with them.
I understand the argument. I am, temperamentally, one of those austere commentators. But I think the argument is wrong.
A city is not a machine for the efficient resolution of problems. A city is a living thing, and a living thing requires, from time to time, the experience of uncomplicated joy. Not the negotiated satisfaction of a budget compromise or the grim vindication of an investigation concluded. Joy. The kind that makes a seventy-year-old woman weep for her late husband, and a nine-year goalkeeper lose his composure on a stage, and a coffee house proprietor run out of milk at half past four in the afternoon.
Felix Rensler, whom I found in the aftermath still beaming behind his counter on Threadneedle Street, put it more plainly than I could.
“They’ll argue about the tramway tomorrow,” he said, handing me a black coffee, his milk having been exhausted hours earlier. “Let them have today.”
Tomorrow they will argue about the tramway. On Wednesday morning the Municipal Chamber will fill with councillors and accountants and engineers, and the conversation will turn, as it must, to copper at 862 florins a tonne and what that means for the Veridan Corridor and whether we can afford the future we have voted for. Ida Pryce will press her case. Aldric Voss will press his. The Mayor will navigate between them as she always does, with more skill than she is generally credited for.
And in the Kaelmar Strait, warships will continue to do whatever it is that warships do when nations have forgotten how to talk to one another.
These are problems for tomorrow and the day after and the months beyond. They are real, and they are serious, and this newspaper will report on them with the diligence they demand.
But I will remember Tuesday. I will remember the sound that rose from the cobblestones of Caldecott Square, and the woman with the scarlet scarf, and the look on Sully Marsh’s face when the words failed him.
A city that can still roar like that has not yet lost the plot.