A holiday to unite us all

Remember FOMO?

Fear of Missing Out – or FOMO for short - was an acronym spawned by the Facebook generation. It marked a point in our lives when we were in a constant state of envy and misery because we weren’t living the glamorous lives that others appeared to be doing - at least if their social media posts were anything to go by.

But FOMO has temporarily disappeared from our lives because we’re all MO these days. Glittering parties, exotic foreign holidays, riotous pub nights – they’ve all been cancelled and all of us are suddenly in the same boat. Except it isn’t a boat, as that wouldn’t be allowed.

However, on VE Day I did have a brief FOMO reprise. Our plans for the day had been pretty modest: we would watch the Churchill address on TV, drink a toast to our fallen heroes, then go to our ersatz pub (well, it was a Friday, after all). But then I spotted the residents of the houses opposite stringing up bunting around their hedges. I’d heard rumours that some people were planning on holding socially-distanced street parties, but had assumed these would be few and far between.

Suddenly it seemed as though people were planning on having FUN. Without me.

Brian and I went on a walk around the local area after that and sure enough there were people hanging out flags, stringing up home-made bunting and dragging chairs and tables into their front gardens. One chap was busy flipping burgers on a barbecue while music played in the background and a bottle of champagne and two glasses were laid out primed and ready on a table next to him. What was going on?

We weren’t having that. There’s no way that WE were MO. So as soon as we returned to the house we hung out a union flag and moved some patio furniture into our front garden. A street party it wasn’t, but drinking a few beers in the sun and chatting to passers-by made us feel much more connected to the occasion. We even found ourselves agreeing to a sing-song outside later. It was all pretty ad-hoc – someone had printed out the words to We’ll Meet Again but at 9pm when we met it was too dark to read them – but we still managed to belt out a few choruses before trickling back inside.

It was all rather charming. Apparently all we need to have fun is a handful of people, a bit of resourcefulness and a common cause for celebration. On the 50thanniversary of VE Day 25 years ago it seems there were parades, street parties and mass gatherings – but for the life of me, I can’t remember any of them.

None of us will forget VE Day 2020 in a hurry. And dare I say, we might even find ourselves looking back nostalgically on the extraordinary day when we managed to connect with our wartime heroes - and our neighbours – without venturing more than a few feet from our own gardens.

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