An interesting comment online under last week's column about the integration journey of migrants. "I do tire of the Guardian's relentless optimism in relation to this," it said. Perhaps we should peddle relentless pessimism. But that would mean linking arms with the side of the media that insists Britain has gone to hell in a handcart. That part of the market is pretty well catered for, don't you think?
It would also be a bad idea because relentless pessimism isn't what's called for. There is a debate to be had about numbers and, by God, we're having it. But if we could drag ourselves away from the gloomsters for just a minute, one might conclude some positive things are happening .
I went to the Proms last week. Not the highfalutin Royal Albert Hall, live-on-BBC-telly event. This was the Proms in the Park. In East Ham, east London. A long standing joint venture between the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Borough of Newham.
"You'll see the most vivid demonstration of multiculturalism in action you've ever seen," said my old friend Cllr Unmesh Desai. Desai handles matters of integration and cohesion. It's a big task. His borough is home to 256,468 non-white British residents, accounting for 83.4 % of its population.
And his pitch to me was: "Come along if you want to see 10,000 people, many of them from minority groups, singing Rule Britannia and waving the union flag". He got it wrong. There were 11,000, many of whom had travelled in, but a vast number were locals. As dusk fell, and capacity was reached, latecomers had to wave their flags from outside a perimeter fence.
Where to look? At the thick-set white guy in the West Ham shirt, smiling and rocking in his camping chair? Or the elderly black woman waving her flag in unison with the man in the beret beside her? At the big Pakistani guy, tapping flags together above his head, his son on his knee? Or at the girls, Latvian, I later discovered, swaying their arms as if in a nightclub? What to think when the forest of flags were raised for Rule Britannia? "Britons never, never, never shall be slaves," roared the crowd, including those descended from the slaves with heritage in the colonies.
What to think? With all that's wrong, maybe something's going right.
