On My Friend Michelle…

Michelle in Montpellier, 2005

In December of last year, my friend Michelle died at her home in London. She was 32.

I thought for a long time whether to talk about this here or not. This post has been sitting in my drafts since January. A year on from her death, I finally decided to just post it.

I met Michelle in 2005 when I took part in the Leonardo da Vinci programme in Montpellier, France. The first two weeks of our three months there was a language brush-up course. In time, five of us in particular splintered off into a group. Natalie, Elena, Michelle, Kate and I met most Fridays and/or Saturdays and became good friends. If I'm honest, it was a feeling I've seldom felt in my life and I cherish that time dearly.

We met up as a group three more times when we got back: once in Manchester, once in Leeds and again in Birmingham. We were immediately back in our group and it felt great to have the best part of Montpellier back for a few hours. I met Natalie twice in Manchester and in October of last year, just weeks before her death, I stayed with Michelle in London. I'm so glad I went now.

I walked with Michelle to the Shard in London that October Saturday. We had a coffee and a cake in a little cafe in its shadow as a couple had their engagement photographs taken across the street. Michelle was looking forward to a change in her life; she was due to leave her post working for the Home Office and spend time helping children in Nepal and Cambodia. She was so excited. That day, she felt a little tired and made her own way home whilst I continued on to walk down the South Bank a little longer with my camera. I took a few photographs that weekend but somehow I didn't take one of Michelle. How I regret that now.

I've been lucky in my life to have lost very few people dear to me. Usually they have been elderly and lived good long lives. Losing Michelle at 32 really shook me up. She was a friend I knew would be a life-long one, someone whom I'd meet up with many more times in my life if not very often. She was someone whose intellect and morality I respected and valued. We couldn't be described as close as we lived so far apart and saw each other so seldom, but she was part of that amazing time in France and I loved her for it.

I am a hopelessly romantic nostalgic and I know I will think of my friends throughout my life. I will visit Montpellier again one of these days and when I do, I might just buy a glass of red wine at the Café du Théâtre on the Place de la Comédie and leave it on the table in the corner where we all met on those evenings – for Michelle.

In the words of John Lennon: I know that I will never lose affection for people and things that went before. I know I'll often stop and think about them; in my life I'll love you more.

Static

There are more people alive now than there has been throughout the history of the human race in total. We saturate our planet. Geographers will tell you that if we were to spread out evenly we’d each have 47¾㎢ to live in. But we don’t spread out. We clump together and live packed into apartment blocks that tower upward like sequoia trees in asphalt jungles. Perhaps this way of living exacerbates the problem I want to talk about, but the fact is there is just a heck of a lot of people around these days.

When you combine the sheer volume of human life with the globalisation of thought and culture that cinema, satellite television and the internet have brought, you get a real cultural problem. I’m going to call it ‘static’.

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In our great cities, people are everywhere.

I visited London recently and walked along the South Bank from The Shard to Westminster as the sun set. As I walked by the Globe Theatre a notion that had been forming in my mind crystallised as I thought of Shakespeare and the famous names of old; there’s so many people now in this place that potential great ones are lost in the background noise.

Where are the original thinkers? The great artists? The luminaries? I thought of Dick Whittington setting off for the city where the streets are paved with gold and asked if there was really any opportunity in this place any longer. Does anyone succeed in our time without a huge slopping spoonful of good luck? By extension, do great people stack shelves whilst unremarkable celebrities dominate our culture?

When Shakespeare came to London the population of the city was a little over 100,000. Think of how much more intimate that would have made the place. How much more likely the great people of the age would have bumped into each other. In 2013, London is infested with 8 to 15 million people depending on how you define it. I feel jealous of those that got to live in a time when they shared the earth with so many fewer people.

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The London of today is vast compared to that of Shakespeare's day

This vastness of connected humanity means it takes exponentially more effort, money, luck to rise above the static. It’s not enough any more to write a nice song, you have to strip naked and swing on a wrecking ball to get airplay. It’s not enough to paint a beautiful landscape to be a famed artist, you have to set dead animals in formaldehyde or dress like an insane Arnold J Rimmer. You can’t write a great book and have it published and wait for the success you deserve, you must win a prize to gain media attention so your book stands above the others. It goes on and on.

I find myself wondering would Shakespeare have been famous in 2014? Would we even have noticed his talent? Perhaps with such an astonishing talent the question breaks down, but would Beethoven have been celebrated above Lady Gaga or would he have had to create some ‘look’ to get noticed? In an age of X-Factor and Britain’s Got ‘Talent’, would he have been relegated to the classical music charts whilst our inane culture bought the latest nobody’s single in the hundreds of thousands?

I can’t help feeling the age of the great individuals has passed. Now, great scientific advances come from institutions, not individuals. Committees of civic planners shape our cities rather than the great philanthropists of yesteryear. Perhaps nothing has fundamentally changed, but the scale of our numbers now seems to have removed the romanticism, lengthened the odds for individuals and drained our world of personality.

…but I digress.