Sunday, May 20, 2007
The banality of motorcades
Watching the live TV crosses of David Hick’s return to Adelaide this morning took me back to an earlier, indelible motorcade association. Princess Diana’s funeral procession, after it had left London, and so without any ceremonial pace or backdrop.
I could not stop watching the TV footage of this, in the unusually-subdued downstairs back bar at the Prince of Wales (no irony intended) in St Kilda. The screen tracked the motorcade’s relentless passage through the ugly English “country”-side, hour after hour. It was like watching a reverse ambulance journey: never wanting it to get “there” and savouring every banal detail as a sort of impediment to its progress.
Maybe this was just a Jungian rehash of the ferryman and the Styx. Which analogy seems appropriate enough to David Hick’s motorcade journey this morning. From hell - or at least legal limbo - and back.
Welcome home, David, you Xer you traitor you martyr, and shine.
Watching the live TV crosses of David Hick’s return to Adelaide this morning took me back to an earlier, indelible motorcade association. Princess Diana’s funeral procession, after it had left London, and so without any ceremonial pace or backdrop.
I could not stop watching the TV footage of this, in the unusually-subdued downstairs back bar at the Prince of Wales (no irony intended) in St Kilda. The screen tracked the motorcade’s relentless passage through the ugly English “country”-side, hour after hour. It was like watching a reverse ambulance journey: never wanting it to get “there” and savouring every banal detail as a sort of impediment to its progress.
Maybe this was just a Jungian rehash of the ferryman and the Styx. Which analogy seems appropriate enough to David Hick’s motorcade journey this morning. From hell - or at least legal limbo - and back.
Welcome home, David, you Xer you traitor you martyr, and shine.
