Friendship, politics and time travel

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Time travel is already here – you can watch it take place if you go to a wedding this summer.

The definition of friendship is when you greet someone you haven’t seen for years but with whom, within minutes of meeting again, you instantly fall back into a rhythm of joshing and japing .

Such camaraderie makes time elastic. It’s what stretches between the crises, plans, achievements, milestones and fiascoes which fill life, and is one of the glories of humanity.

With the right music, it’s possible to jump from reminiscing about old times to actually experiencing them again.

I was at a splendid wedding in the Midlands a few weeks’ ago when the digital jukebox started playing uproarious tunes from the days before Jarvis Cocker grew a beard. We were soon jumping around like otters with a gleeful abandon our ligaments hadn’t experienced for close to a decade.

This is more than nostalgia. Such happiness not only refreshes memories, but it reintroduces us to dreams which once burned.

No matter how confused modern France may be as globalisation bubbles through Europe, it must be extraordinarily hard for even the most cynical Gaul to sing La Marseillaise and not be stirred by the Technicolor of the founding dream:

What does this horde of slaves,
Of traitors and conspiring kings want?
For whom are these vile chains,
These long-prepared irons?

But just as music and great company can shine a light on the past and instantly pick out the diamonds buried there, what is exciting is that these rays of illumination can stretch into the future.

After watching an episode of the West Wing I used to hum with a neutron glow of optimism. The White House presented in Aaron Sorkin’s televisual masterpiece bore no resemblance to the crisis-bedraggled administration in power at the time, but this vision of politics showed how idealism and virtue could still somehow exist in the 21st century, even if such notions are carried in the cracked earthenware vessels all of us are.

In fact, art, even when it acknowledges our darkest failings, allows us to see hope on a horizon for the act of creation is the summoning of something out of nothing.

As the graphic novelist Alan Moore recently said: “Ideas start out in the empty void of your head – and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.”

With institutions crumbling across Britain there is the potential for a moment of springtime. And the work of building a better society rooted in the best of the past is a reward in itself.