14th June – I heard there was a secret chord, that David played, and it pleased the Lord. But you don’t really care for music, do you?

We have been back in the country only a few days, and we’ve already watched the first event of national importance – the descent into my family’s motherland, of twenty-thousand bikers. They set off from North London, picking up others along the way, until, three-hundred miles and six hours later, all twenty-thousand of them landed in Barrow-in-Furness. All to celebrate the inaugural Dave’s Day, in honour of beloved and proud Barrovian, Dave Myers, one half of the Hairy Bikers (the TV cooks for foreign readers) who died earlier this year.

Fascinated by this singular event, Friend John wondered whether, if this were to become an annual event, a pilgrimage say, to honour the life of one the world’s nice people, how might it be perceived two-hundred years from now. How those tales of the early pilgrims will, by then, have grown and distorted into folklore. It’s a subject to ponder, even in this digital age, where everyone carries a mobile computer, and carries out most of their conversations through digital applications, how might this ancient tradition of working up narratives whittle away at the facts, to transform them into something very different from that to which the original attendees bore witness.

Supplant this story into a place two-thousand years ago, he says – into a population of ignorant, illiterate people, cowed into awed admiration by local leaders, and biddable to any passing storyteller with charisma, gravitas, and a plausible story to explain the weather and the seasons; and you can see how it can get out of hand. Where might the celebration of Dave’s Day have ended up had it happened back then? Whither, might it? The advent of davinity perhaps?

It’s early days yet, but what I like about it, at this stage of an election cycle, is that it drew a crowd of forty thousand or so to a town with a population of only sixty-thousand. And it was all to honour the life one of the gentlest and nicest people who’d ever lived. But so are many of them nice too. Nice. We see and hear and lots of things from people who occupy the poles in our society; much of which, we don’t wish to. But rarely do we hear from the middle; the vast middle that outnumbers either margin by about ten to one. Often, they don’t have an enormous amount to say – they just live their lives in silent obeisance, hoping for small improvements in their lot; listeners, not talkers.

But when they do appear as one; one enormous movement, it would behove the PR people, politicians, business leaders, and all of the rest of them with their passion projects, who never think to do that one thing in which we’d all support them – shutting their cake holes for a minute, to take notice. For this is passion. Quietly spoken perhaps, but passion nonetheless. Joining together to recognise a humble, honest, likable soul, who had lived his life well. They saw in Dave a man who loved his, and their, hometown, but who never once couched his words with qualifying phrases like, ‘Not everyone will like it as I do;’ nor, did he over-sell it either. He described it as it was, and that was what he liked. And his local compatriots felt just the same about him. He was nice, and he was normal. That’s how they describe him. That’s not to damn him with feint praise; it’s not to claim that word, ‘normal’ and turn it into something that means, ‘just like me’.  It’s to express qualities to which they aspire; something they wish for their own families to possess. And don’t they all, Dave, and the people who loved him, make a welcome contrast to the other national event that is taking place in the UK, and many other countries at the moment; where so many people are suddenly talking about their love of their nation, and the greater good for all of us, and do it all without the slightest notion of how utterly transparently vulgar and disingenuous they seem to the rest of us?

Dave’s Day was a mass movement of which they can only dream; yet never, so long as they remain in public life, stand alongside, as one of them. For Dave’s silent majority stands for everything they’re not. Dave’s are people of fewer words, but when they stand together, if only they knew it, a far stronger voice.