My Random Encounter With Jeremy Corbyn…
— Read on theburningbloggerofbedlam.wordpress.com/2018/05/13/my-random-encounter-with-jeremy-corbyn/
This is just a short one; and is really just an anecdote and not anything important.
But the most random, odd thing happened to me a couple of weeks back. It was on the day my grandfather passed away – in fact, it was just a few minutes before my grandfather passed away and it took place in the hospital.
A number of family members and extended family members were gathered in the Whittington Hospital in North London. My grandfather was on life-support and we were told he was unlikely to last the day. My mother and I decided that we would stay the night with him so that everyone else could eventually go home. I had spent the last year-and-a-half or so living in my grandfather’s house and attending to him in the night hours, so it felt only natural that I would stay the final night too.
As we came out of the elevator and started walking across to the entrance, I was in a distracted state of mind, suspecting (correctly, as it happened) that I might’ve just seen my grandfather for the last time.
Lost in my thoughts, I barely registered someone saying, “Is that Jeremy Corbyn?”
It was the nature of the encounter – and the timing of it – that made it feel strange. I’ve encountered famous people before, including high-profile politicians before, such as Ken Livingstone: but those tend to be fairly dry, spiritless affairs. A girlfriend of mine from when I was a teenager met Tony Blair and in fact interviewed him: she thought it made her a big-shot journalist (it really didn’t). In fact, she’d forgotten about it within a month, so it clearly made no impression.
It occurred to me days later that it was the informality of running into Corbyn in that sort of environment that made it register so strongly. It wouldn’t be that easy to just randomly go up to any other major political leader, hug him against his will and have him seem perfectly okay with it. I can’t imagine it would’ve gone so amiably with any previous Labour Party leader, or with any leader of the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. You would almost forget that he’s the leader of the major opposition party of Britain.
Location – Whittington Hospital
#jc4pm
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