Monday 4th August, 2003 – Re-union

This weekend I attended what is becoming the annual Hill family re-union (this is the second year that it has taken place, so it might be a bit presumptuous to call it annual as yet – ask me this time next year, when an audience of many thousands will probably be reading this on tiny wrist-mounted video screens, pausing only to pop silver energy pills into their mouths and change the batteries in their jet-pack shoes).

Obviously, not everybody there is called Hill, and as a family re-union it is slightly limited in its scope, ignoring the dozens of other Hill family members who live outside of South East England. All the same, this year saw esteemed visitors from the U.S and the Netherlands. A particular buzz of excitement passed through the Pringles-eating throng when the realisation hit that our American visitor was a famous news anchorwoman on ABC News, called Maureen Bunyan.

As the evening wound down, a few of us sat in the lounge trying to find ABC News on satellite TV, but couldn’t. At one point we accidentally tuned into Fox News during the Weekly Sunday U.S.A Whoop-athon, an exercise which involves a thick-necked mid-western teenager staring into the camera for a full hour while pumping his fist, hooting, and chanting “U-S-A!” as Gulf War highlight footage plays out behind him.

I didn’t ask, but I gather that this is not the type of news that Maureen would approve of. She has the unerringly sober and authoritative demeanour of a Michael Burke, crossed with the laser-beam intensity and intelligence of Late Review schoolmarm Bonnie Greer. This is a good thing, but I found that I completely clammed up when I was around her, for fear of saying something coarse or stupid. Given that I’d had a lot to drink by this point, and had spent quite a successful afternoon telling coarse, stupid stories to indulgent second and third cousins, encouraging me to ever-greater heights of coarseness and stupidity, I am pleased that I decided to keep my mouth shut.

It was a brilliant day. The sun was out, everybody bought nice things to drink, and I took a turn standing at the barbecue in shorts, with my hands on my hips just like real men do. Unfortunately, my stint as barbecuer-in-chief was something of a disaster, as I carelessly blinked at one point, in which time the slightly underdone chicken thighs and sausages that were sitting on the grill transformed themselves into tiny, desiccated husks of pure carbon.

But the best thing was making connections with family members whom, until last year, I didn’t know at all, and feeling bonds growing that might even be permanent. The whole thing gave me a very nice feeling of being part of something that doesn’t come along very often.

At one point, Michelle looked around at the figures slumped in white patio furniture, in various states of drunkenness, and said “God, we are so fucking diverse”. And it was true. There was every colour in the human palette, from dark brown to lily white (Paul Sims). It was like some low budget, Middle England Gap advert – coffee-coloured children breaking their milk teeth on jet-black sausages; multi-ethnic women in calottes spilling Pimms on their blouses next to the koi karp. Wonderful.

Unfortunately things got ugly toward the end of the day, as the sense of occasion, the booze, and the hot sun seemed to invoke a state of mass hysteria. A hysteria which manifested itself in the most intense and cutthroat frenzy of photography that I have ever been party to. What started out as a quite reasonable request to pose for a few photos became a gruelling ordeal, as every combination of man, woman and child was hustled together to pose for dozens of identically framed photographs.

“Men at the back, women and children at the front, you know the drill!” was the cry. We did. Under the blazing sun, we were ordered to sit on a bench, striking bizarre, formal, Victorian-style poses, turning our rictus grins toward whichever of the paparazzi-style bank of cameras was being brandished most raucously at the time: “Over here! Just one More!”

Men who had arrived in black slacks saw them turn grey, as they were bleached by the relentlessly popping flashbulbs. Youngsters cowered together and pressed themselves against the floor as if pinned down by sniper-fire. Some rogue elements had started to roam around, snapping freestyle – people dared not look at or touch one another for the fear of being told “Freeze!! Don’t move a muscle – that is a beautiful picture, how romantic!”

Eventually, when their cameras clicked empty, the snappers retired indoors, satisfied with their haul, leaving the dazed snappees to emerge from foxholes, slapping and prodding their fallen comrades into wakefulness, dilated pupils slowly readjusting to natural light.

I’ve taken the analogy too far now, but to summarise, a hell of a lot of pictures were taken, dozens of which were essentially identical. I’m expecting that, when they go to collect their photos, some snappers will be faced with apologetic-looking staff explaining that there must have been some kind of problem in the lab, as it seems that the same photo has just been re-printed over and over again, please accept a discount.

But I can also quite imagine that, in years to come, I’ll be glad that they were taken. I will be even gladder if next year someone just brings a video camera.