Abide With Me
I am currently reading the Bill Hodges trilogy by Stephen King. While it is not going to win any Pulitzer prizes or Man Bookers (mainly due to the limitation on King’s part that his novels are popular); they are a nonetheless enjoyable set of books that are deliberately and unashamedly firmly within the hard-boiled, film noir, genre — and grounded within an entirely realistic world of which King is routinely finding himself more comfortable than he is with his own supernatural one. The second book of the trilogy, Finders Keepers, features as a protagonist a character called Peter Saubers who undergoes an artistic awakening moment in realising how much literature means to him. This comes, like it does for so many who do fall in love with books in real life, from a school English teacher who starts of his first lesson with Saubers’ class by writing on the whiteboard behind him the words:
“This is stupid.”
The teacher then proceeds to explain that this is the main comment from any class of teenagers when learning and reading the works of the great writers: Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Chandler, Woolf, Bronte et al, until of course one day, and that day could be many years in the future when one falls in love with someone they shouldn’t or when they are made unemployed for the first time or experience great tragedy in the family — it clicks. And it is then that these works suddenly become very not stupid. Instead they become very, very meaningful, relevant, understandable and everything that everyone said it would be.
As I rapidly approach my 30th birthday, I have been thinking a lot about this line a lot as, while most certainly a bookish teenager, I am still finding that things that I would have ordinarily dismissed as stupid as a 17 year old are suddenly finding renewed resonance with me and, with the pandemic, this also seems to be more true of the world as whole. Intangible love of the stranger aspects of the human condition are being shifted in to sharp focus as to how much to they mean to us, even if it is impossible to explain why.
I, in particular, thought about this a great deal as I watched the 2021 Football Association Challenge Cup final, determined for the first time in over a year, to enjoy a football match on television as a neutral (despite the snooze fest of which may well happen on the pitch as it so often does with Cup Finals).
And this is what brings me to Abide With Me — a hymn sung before every FA Cup Final since 1927 when a military band entertaining the crowd played the song in amongst a medley of other well-known standards. Its composer was Henry Francis Lyte, who was a very sick man and like many who have known to be very sick and ill, desperately tried to find solace where he could. Being an Anglican, and it being 1847, he looked to God and asked for him to stand with him. Overtly religious, yes, but certainly a general premise even the staunchest atheist and humanist can understand: “Please can I not be alone in my most difficult moment?”.
In an office with cork board walls and chairs of pastel colours and an artisan espresso machine, a marketing executive would have almost certainly said, at some point over the last 20 years whenever the pre-match routine was decided for the a particular year’s Cup Final and they looked at the timetable and saw the slot for Abide With Me, that phrase: “this is stupid”. A religious hymn sung before the game, mostly ignored by the fans and awkwardly mentioned by commentators. In the modern world, less a marketable asset to the event, and instead a dreaded anachronism. With the FA in recent years desperate to avoid the FA Cup becoming the supposed anachronism that they wrongly believe people think it is becoming, it is a miracle that it survived this long.
While I remember Cup finals as far back as 1998 as a child, the first one I can properly remember experiencing is the 2006 Gerrard Final. I sat through several hours of television coverage, soaking up everything as well as everyone does at that age, and when it came to the singing of Abide With Me I recall seeing the awkward looking players, the hastily arranged singer rushing through and the BBC’s cameras desperate to find any older fans who could possibly be muttering along with it. I learnt a bit about it from the internet, that it was written in 1847 that it was about the singer’s need to have God with them and, as I was going through the phase of understanding my then sapling atheistic beliefs (of which I retain to this day), I would have almost certainly said to myself: “this is stupid”. I didn’t really think of Abide With Me since.
But… But then things happen in the world that are unimaginable. And suddenly these things are not stupid. One day, they click and we understand everything what is meant within that song, or book, or piece of art. They become very, very unstupid. These things become crucial and critical, and they help us understand what it means to be human.
And during its singing at the 2021 FA Cup Final, suddenly, Abide With Me meant everything. To everyone. The first meaningful football match in months with spectators. The first Cup Final in two years with them.
Fans at Wembley, young and old, raised their scarves in the air and sang. Sang for everyone that couldn’t be there. Sang for all of those who gave the greatest sacrifice in their help of others. Sang the words even though they had never done before. Many had tears streaming down their face. Gary Lineker, rather wonderfully not for the first time of the day either, could barely hold back his emotions as he passed on to the commentary team. Prince William, a man whose family and job I usually carry a great deal of cynicism for, looked genuinely moved by the occasion as he walked onto the pitch to greet the players and I couldn’t help but feel very touched by his reaction. Spines tingled and, as it reached its end, a roar like nothing else literally heard for well over a year, punctured into the air in defiance. The stage was set.
A long time ago, Abide With Me could have been dropped by that aforementioned marketing executive and not much fuss would have been had. A couple of tweets here, a broadsheet column there; but like any other drop of meaningful tradition from the Cup, football or sport in general, its release from FA Cup duty would have been eventually quietly forgotten without too much outrage.
Yet here it was. There on that day in 2021. So let is remember this before we start looking to drop any other traditions from the FA Cup, from football, from sport. Those things in which we find so comforting in their familiarity, their warmth and their meaning.
For a constant for all of those years that may have seemed a strange anachronism for such a long period of time, can suddenly mean everything after a dreadful time in which everything is but familiar.
