Real Communities, Not Made-up Ones

Contrary to many Leftists’ ideas that most Right-leaning people are uncaring, unthinking and money-orientated, a lot of those who do volunteer work or do low-paid jobs (which they don’t need to do) are small-C conservative types. They are the lifeblood of the nation. They are a world away from the tiresome technocrats in our institutions, or the Woke witches’ covens that are modern-day HR teams. Surely one of the reasons Britain, England in particular, used to be a beacon of light to the world was the kindness and diligence of a large portion of its citizens.

(At this point I’ll note that Lefties may perform such roles also, and that Britain does not have the global monopoly on such acts. There’s your disclaimer.)

I’m living proof of someone on the Right who ‘gives back to the community’, and feels better for it. Also, it gives you a fresh and interesting perspective on human behaviour and your country.

Since 2017 I have done volunteer work in a shop at a Non-League football club. I’ve served, who knows, five thousand different customers. The vast majority have been good, decent people. There are mums and dads and their kids. There are the ground-hoppers, who come in for a precious club pin badge as proof of visit. There are the grandparents after a shirt for their grandchild (”How much?!”). There are the thirsty fans desperate for directions to the bar.

A good proportion of customers are elderly or have some sort of condition. There was the deaf and dumb chap who week after week came in urging me, through pointing, to give him a reduced rate shirt; there are visitors from Germany, the USA, Norway, Holland (the word they used – not ‘Netherlands’), China and elsewhere; there are stag groups; there are women who come for ‘Ladies’ Day’, many attending their first ever game of football (there are also Family Days and Student Days). Schoolchildren come in to help us and are given valuable, character-building tasks around the ground.

I get a fair few customers who are autistic and endlessly chat away. The club is likely an important social lifeline for them, and following the team gives more meaning to their existence. Once I took a phone call from an elderly lady who asked me if it was possible if her late husband’s ashes could be scattered on our pitch – it brought a lump to my throat.

In the bar after the game the players mix with the fans – imagine that at Manchester United – and the previous manager used to come in to give his match verdict before doing the draw to win a keg of beer.

In short, it is a place that does untold good to people’s well-being. But in 2020, dull and mean Whitehall bureaucrats, unbothered about the conviviality of a working-class football Saturday, wrecked it all. Our grim government prioritised, in the extreme, saving lives over the quality of lives (not that lockdowns saved lives, as even Chris Whitty admitted), and how they didn’t give a fig about personal choice.

There was a mad period in late 2020 when people could go to a cinema, pub or restaurant but not a football stadium, despite them being open air environments which were perfectly safe.

Talking of cinemas… I also did part-time work, besides my journalism, between 2014 and 2020, at a well-liked cinema in the South-west of England. I did the box office, refreshment stand, ushering and even weddings. Alongside its picture house status, it felt like a hub for the elderly and the lonely.

‘Silver Screen’ offered pensioners a cut-price flick with tea and biscuits thrown in; ‘Big Scream’ allowed mothers with babies to watch a film with their little miracles on their laps; ’Toddler Time’ had parents giving their toddlers their first big screen experience, perhaps Rastamouse or Tractor Ted; ‘Kids Club’ on Saturday morning inexpensively offered movies for children only, with the staff putting on activities for the kids before the film; there were even special dog-friendly shows, usually for films with an animal theme, like Isle Of Dogs or Pick Of The Litter, where (mostly) obedient canines laid at their owners’ feet while the movie played.

The cinema was a place for all the community, for all ages, for everyone to meet and share in so much more than just seeing a film.

What an experience that could be, though. One of my favourite things was watching people after they came out of the auditorium just after the film finished: they usually looked dazed in a rather wonderful way, their minds processing whatever emotion the movie had given them. They emerged, blinking into the light, reluctantly zoning back into the mundane reality that they’d escaped for a couple of hours. They might then comment, “Ooh, it’s got dark” or “Look at the rain – it was dry when we came in!”

The enjoyment and gratefulness of individual customers was what made the job worthwhile. Just giving instructions to a tourist popping in to ask how to get somewhere, and then being thanked for doing so, gave me a fillip.

Interactions with individual customers could be memorable. At the end of A Bigger Splash two elderly ladies giggled among themselves, then saw me – “You’ll like it,” one of them said, “there’s a lot of nudity in it!” We had a canny lady in her late eighties, deaf as a post, who used to visit regularly after a long bus journey. She came out of a screening of the 2018 Yellow Submarine re-release, fixed me with a gaze, and blared: “THAT WAS WEIRD.”

I remember the very first screening on the very first day of S&M flick Fifty Shades Of Grey, when a sweet old gentleman pensioner shuffled in and quietly took his seat in the middle of the auditorium.

It’s the regular customers you remember most: the elderly lady who came in, literally bent double, clutching her stick, shakily navigating the steps; the raven-haired middle-aged lady in the red dress who always came alone to National Opera performances, who I always imagined had her greatest happiness in life when she sat in her seat; the couple who usually rushed in at the last second for performances and gave us their home-made honey drink; once I served a cup of tea to a member of Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet, former Northern Ireland secretary Tom King. All life was there.

Just a few words exchanged can lift the mood, can take one outside of the suffocating confines of the mind. Boris Johnson’s lockdown disembowelment of the arts, entertainment, sport and hospitality industries meant billions of small moments of the temporary lightening of the weight of existence never happened.

Cinemas, like pubs, have never really properly recovered from what the government did to them. Community institutions have also been pummelled by anti-business economic policies, high energy costs and neighbourhoods fractured by new arrivals.

I never returned to work at the cinema after March 2020, though I was paid ‘furlough’ money I didn’t really deserve and on the books for another two years. I continue to volunteer at the football club, which lifts my spirits and hopefully makes other people’s day a little bit better. This isn’t to blow my own trumpet, it’s to draw attention to the importance of family, community, country. Which I believe is the core message of a British political party that has just done very well in the local elections.