There’s no accounting for tastes, I often think.

Particularly when they’re your own.

Tastes – in the sense of what you actually like, deep down, as opposed to what you think you ought to like, and as opposed to what you’d like others to believe you like – tastes have their own rules and their own impetus. Tastes refuse, often times, to be guided by social mores or by what you might think of as your ‘better self’. Tastes are atavistic, anachronistic. Or at least mine are.

I’m thinking here of a number of things. Cheese and chip sandwiches, for example. With soft white bread from a packet, and thick butter that melts in, and chips from the chip-shop. How sophisticated is that? How health-inducing?

And ice-cream from machines in vans. Though you could argue that these are sort of good, in a way, because if you have a flake in them, that adds in another of the major food groups – so you get both chocolate and ice-cream. And that counts, I should imagine, towards what people call your ‘five a day’. I’m not sure that the cones themselves count as a food group as such, in themselves – more likely nutritionists would list them as a sub-set of a food group: biscuits, say.

But when I talk about odd and anachronistic tastes, and tastes you don’t always own up to having, in particular here I’m thinking of the Last Night of the Proms.

Because what it is, on one level, is this: a big load of shiny-faced wazzocks in blazers standing around grinning, waving little flags on sticks, to music. And also creating ‘hilarious’ sound-effects with old-fashioned motor-car horns to the fantasia on British sea-songs. And taking out large handkerchiefs and pretending to cry. And so on, and so forth.

And yet.

And yet I watch it, every year.

And yet, more to the point, I more than watch it. And yet I find myself strangely moved, and strangely stirred by it.

And yet I find myself thinking, This is my country. And these daft wazzocks are my people. And I am of them. If you get my drift.

It’s the music, partly, and the power of it to unlock what’s buried inside the soul.

Take Wlliam Blake’s Jerusalem, as a case in point, in Hubert Parry’s setting. What Jerusalem is, as has been observed elsewhere, is a series of questions to which the answer is “Actually, no;” and it’s all based around the…er, fanciful suggestion that the young Jesus Christ might, at some point, have visited Glastonbury with his uncle Joseph of Arimathea. In a space-ship, right?

But I hear the first few notes and I’m there, and I’m all fired up with mystical fervour at the idea of England’s green and pleasant land, and sweeping away all those dark Satanic mills.

And I imagine swords and spears and chariots of fire, and the pavements cracking as roots and branches force their way through to reclaim their ancestral home, and I imagine buried and lost streams breaking to the surface and flowing in the open again. And dappled sunlight and kingfishers darting.

And pretty much every building put up after 1850, say, being instantly vapourised, and replaced, all of them, by fields and farms, and broad-leaf woodland between.

All of those endless dreary outer-London suburbs.

All of the retail-parks and business-parks and multiscreen multiplexes. And the ring-roads and gyratory systems, the flyovers and underpasses.

All of them. The whole lot.

And Slough.

I think, sometimes, that Blake wasn’t quite so bonkers after all.

And don’t even get me started on Land of Hope and Glory.

But it’s too late for that now because I’ve already got me started.

Suffice it to say that on hearing the words of A.C. Benson’s song to the tune of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance No.1, “Wider still and wider/ Shall thy bounds be set/ God who made thee mighty/ Make thee mightier yet,” my thoughts turn instantly to khaki shorts and pith-helmets, and union-jacks fluttering in the breeze in far-flung hill-stations, and maps of the world tinted pink.

I don’t mean this in an ironic way, you understand, or a postcolonial-guilt way, or any of the ways you’re supposed to feel about it these days, but in a straightforward and straightforwardly nostalgic way. As in, isn’t it sad we lost it all, and wouldn’t it be great if we could have it back?

I think of the words of Rudyard Kipling’s lament for lost empire, Recessional – written, ironically, when the empire was at its peak, and not at all lost: “Far-called, our navies melt away/ On dune and headland sinks the fire/ Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/ Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”

Nostalgia for lost empire isn’t something I’d normally admit to in polite company; but when I hear Land of Hope and Glory and see the blazered loons singing in the Albert Hall it’s how I feel, and I’d be a liar to pretend otherwise.

And I suspect that I’m not the only one who feels that way.

Not necessarily about the British empire, particularly – that would be a bit odd if you were Italian, say, or Chinese or whatever; but about the idea of your people’s ancient glories. And there are any number to choose from, depending on who your people are: whether you go for something well-known, like Rome; or less so, like, for example, the great seafaring empire of the Lords of the Isles, who ruled the Hebrides and much of the West Coast of Scotland for centuries, until one of them decided to invade the mainland in the 15^th century, and came badly unstuck.

Prince Charles has the title now, by the way.

But when you look at the books people choose to read, and the films people choose to watch, and even the computer-games people choose to play, you see time and time again the theme of the lost glories and battles of the past lying hidden beneath the mundane life of the everyday, and the prospect of their restoration.

In no particular order: Harry Potter discovering that he’s a big shot in the wizarding world and part of an age-old battle between good and evil; plain old Ben Kenobi in Star Wars turning out to be the proposterously-named Obi-Wan; the wanderer Strider in Lord of the Rings emerging as Aragorn, son of Arathorn; and anything ‘written’ by Dan Brown.

And of course there’s the poor carpenter’s son Jesus son of Joseph who, it turns out, is… well, you know.

And indeed the Greek gods and Hindu deities who likewise take it into their heads from time to time to appear in human form, concealing their true, mythological nature beneath humdrum modernity.

So.

Now, remind me again of how I got from cheese and chip sandwiches to here?

Ah yes. Tastes.

Our tastes, I think – and particularly ones we are most embarrassed about but can’t help but feel drawn to – those things are truer and more revealing signs of what we really are inside, than what we’d like others to believe about us and what we stand for.

And I think all of the ‘important’ things about a person – their principles, their opinions, their positions on the issues of the day – I think that none of them matter anywhere near as much, or are even half so revealing, as the little, inconsequential, guilty pleasures they can’t help but be drawn towards.

Warwick Cairns is an author, he lives in Windsor, Berkshire.

Beat will be following Warwick Cairns through these collumns on his journey to publication of new book “In Praise of Savagery”: the true story of a journey into uncharted land inhabited by murderous tribal warriors and ruled over by a bloodthirsty sultan – and the man, the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who lived to tell the tale. And the story of Warwick’s journey, fifty years later, to a mud hut in Africa to visit him at the end of his life.

More about Warwick Cairns can be found here

Tagged as: aragorn son of arathorn, british empire, dan brown, guilty pleasure, harry potter, In Praise of Savagery, issue 12, last night of the proms, pleasure, warwick cairns, wilfred thesiger