The whole street came out to play in the snow. Scarves, gloves and cups of extra strong tea. Caught up in the excitement, neighbors who have probably never spoken before made easy chatter. Men in flat caps beamed and nodded from the pavement. Children threw snowballs. The hunchbacked woman who pushes a trolley around with her little dog’s head poking out opened her door and smiled, possibly for the first time in years. People arriving home from work dropped their commuters’ grimaces and grinned widely at the giant snowball. The 20-foot high snowball.
It was, of course, all fake. This is London. We’ll be lucky to get a dusting of the white stuff in February, much less in mid-November. A company called Snow Business had pumped the “biodegradable paper product” out of a van with a hoze and nozzle. (That last scene in Bridget Jones’ Diary? Paper. Wonder Boys, Cold Mountain, Beloved? All paper.)
Crews had set up outside the house early this morning to film the BBC’s Christmas ident, the feel-good clip that will air between programs over the Christmas period. A location manager had been working the street for weeks, until the sense of expectation was as intense as the night before Christmas itself. After all, what could anyone want more in the 21st century than five seconds of fame?
The irony is that by whipping up an idyllic image of community spirit here, in the name of show business, the Beeb succeeded, in a way, in creating what it wanted to mimic. Everything in the first paragraph above was as real as it was artificial.
Now, twelve hours after it began, Christmas in Maidenstone Hill has been put away again. A street sweeper is scraping the gunky paper product off the rain-damp street, and men are ripping apart the giant Styrofoam snowball that took a craftsman two weeks to make. They’re demolishing it one man-sized chunk at a time.
But something occurred here today, and not all of it was illusion.
