We've Come A Long Way, Mr Mayor

We live in an area of overlapping local authorities here in sunny Surrey. Back in Buckinghamshire, when local government was reorganised in 1974, the new authority centred on High Wycombe deliberately refrained from constituting itself as a Borough in deference to the feelings of the small towns of Marlow and Princes Risborough, who might otherwise resent being gobbled up by their big neighbour, and became Wycombe District Council instead. Here, though, the towns retained their Mayors at the same time as the overarching authority became a Borough with its own Mayor. So, as I plan the Civic Service for the new Mayor of the area (who happens to be Paula, Pastoral Assistant, councillor and many other things besides) to be held at Swanvale Halt church in a few weeks, yesterday I went to the equivalent event for the new Mayor of Hornington. I hope you’re following all this, not that I’ll be asking questions later.

This was a secular event and I wondered what to expect. Arriving a couple of minutes late, I found a hall full of people either clapping their hands or waving them in the air to ‘Dynamite’ by Korean boy-band BTS which I can fairly say fell well outside the parameters of anything I might have anticipated. The new Mayor’s keynotes for his year of office are ‘positivity’ and ‘inclusion’, and you can’t deny that his inaugural event expressed that, as we progressed through two local amateur choirs doing turns (though it struck me that ‘I Want to Dance With Somebody’ is actually quite a melancholy piece of work), funny children’s portraits of the Mayor projected on the wall, and culminating in Fatboy Slim. More clapping and handwaving: it curiously reminded me of evangelical worship, which shows how close that is to the wider culture. I will have to reflect on that.

The Mayor’s promises to serve his community, and ours to help him do so, said everything that needed saying. Life’s not all ha-ha hee-hee, though, I couldn’t help myself thinking as I was showered in all that community loveliness, in which it seemed absolutely required that we have a mild titter every minute we weren’t listening to someone sing, and without tremendous self-restraint I can see myself delivering a very jaundiced homily indeed when the Borough gathers at the church a couple of weeks from now!