The Last Night of the Proms is always a bizarre event. The best-known concert in the world, it mixes melancholia with craziness as a finale to the summer season at the Albert Hall; and for determined Promenaders who have been there every night for eight weeks, there’s an understandable emotion when they link arms and sing Auld Lang Syne. It marks a passing in the year of some significance.
More broadly, though, it celebrates a passing culture steeped in fantasies of what it is or isn’t to be British. Heavy with nostalgic rituals whose meaning has in part been lost to irony, its messages are mixed and hard to read. But one clear message this year was that European flags outnumbered Union Jacks by three to one: a signal someone in the chaos of our current government might ponder.
