When Memory Lane took me to Never Land

It must, I suspect, be my age that keeps driving me back down Memory Lane.

On my trip to London this week, I stayed in a hotel in Kensington. West Kensington, I should add, not the really fashionable bit. But even so, I wandered down a few charming Mews or around squares lush with leaves and with their private park in the middle, and saw how privilege is still doing just fine in Britain, Brexit or no Brexit, recession or no recession.

Quiet elegance in Kensington
How the other 1% live

The hotel was also within walking distance of Hyde Park. This is the biggest park in London, although technically only one end of it is actually Hyde Park: all the western bit is called Kensington Gardens. For a walker wandering around it, however, it all feels like one colossal extent of glorious greenery, with its fountains and even its lake, the Serpentine. Except that when Hyde Park gives way to Kensington Gardens, the lake changes name too, just to confuse visitors. It becomes the Long Water.

The Long Water. Looking towards the Serpentine

It occurred to me that I really didn’t know Hyde Park at all well. Mostly I only go there for demonstrations, and then only to the far eastern end. Then I trail along the side of the park and through the streets of London with a million or two others, doing our damnedest to stop damn fool acts like the Iraq War or Brexit. Quite why we bother isn’t clear to me, since we hardly achieved our aim on those occasions.

This time I went for two or three walks in the park and made a point of acquainting myself with some of the bits I’d never been to, or not been to for a long time. I went to see the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Playground, dedicated as the name implies to the memory of the person the French persist in referring to as “Leddi Di”. It looked like a fairly impressive playground but not that different from ones I’d seen elsewhere. Euro Disney it certainly wasn’t.

The Diana Pricess of Wales Memorial Fountain was also pleasant, but hardly breathtaking. And, because the designers had clearly decided not to let go of the theme once they’d got hold of it, they’re linked by a Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Path which is probably the best of the three, but only because a long path through fine parkland is always attractive.

None of these things, however, were my real objective in going to the park. I wanted to go, or rather go back, to the Peter Pan statue. Somewhere deep in my somewhat misty memory was a recollection of my parents taking my brother and me there when I was about eight, and telling me on the way that it was absolutely marvellous and evocative of the whole world of Never Land.

I couldn’t remember whether, once I’d stood before the statue, I’d felt any of that magic, and I wanted to get back to see what feelings it would awake in me.

You can imagine, I wanted to see whether I’d experience a sense of poignancy, of nostalgia, of the lost wonder of childhood, particularly as the parents who’d taken us to see Pan have both since gone to their graves. My wife always laughs at the way that I can spring a tear over a rom com. Here was a heaven-sent opportunity to indulge all my mawkish sentimentalism to the full.

Finally, I got there. And stood before the pleasant little statue, bits of which, like any bronze sculpture, had been rubbed by thousands of hands to gleam yellow. And what did it evoke in me?

Peter Pan. Rediscovered at last

Well, to be honest, nothing at all. No tingle of nostalgia. No pricking of the eyelids at long-distant recollections of childhood.

In fact, I couldn’t remember the anything about my previous visit to it at all.