Button's Birthplace by Daniel Birch
My birthplace is ambivalently shared with Formula One driver Jenson Button. An ever-present celebrity ghost story, parading primary school corridors and lingering in local news headlines, he was a figurehead of success from a small Somerset town, a figurehead that was never quite embraced by its population. In the town centre, there’s a bridge built in his honour, perhaps due to his underreported love of bridges. It was made parallel to the previously existing and more frequently used bridge, a marked oddity of council funding to this day. His success may have soared on the racetracks, but in this little town only the faintest trace of his legacy remains, like the whispered engravings on ancient gravestones, barley legible with age, algae, and dereliction. Those whisperings, however, were temporarily restored to clarity on the Christmas when Jenson Button returned to his birthplace.
December of 2013: The humble population of our equally humble town- in their thousands- waited in the cold, huddled like emperor penguins. Stretching far and wide, the crowd went from the far reaches of the community car park, to the southernmost point of the high street’s end. In summation, around half a kilometre. In the middle of the road, barriers split and cleared a path, unlit Christmas lights hanging above in dismal little rows. The 14-foot Christmas tree also stood with some awkwardness awaiting instructions. I found myself huddled amongst the crowd with my mum, a curious but chilly 11-year-old with only the backs of tall adults to gaze upon. Here, we learnt that not everyone in the crowd was a local, as mum chatted with a young woman who claimed to be the number one Jenson Button superfan. With photographic evidence, she divulged the entirety of her self-employed career of following Button around the country to us, how she had attended various events and public appearances to get all but a glimpse at his holiness. Remarking upon how lucky we were for being residents of the same town as her idol, as if we lived in the Jerusalem of the F1 Jesus, she left promptly, perhaps to get a glimpse of the star himself. So, we moved on, weaving our way through the crowd, until a spot was found where I could just about scale the lower side of a building, peering above the sea of heads and onto the road beyond.
The sound of the vehicle growled into existence before we saw him, and the whizzing blur turned a corner into our view, kicking dust out as it went. In the same instance, a thousand hearing aids collectively imploded from the sudden roaring fanfare, as the largely elderly population of the crowd found themselves incapacitated by such catastrophic volume. Jenson stepped out of the enlarged toy car and joined the town mayor to turn on the Christmas lights for the town of Frome. Rows of lights above us winked into life, and the Christmas tree sparkled with newfound enthusiasm and confidence.
On the whole, however, it was a disappointing display- short-lived, anticlimactic, and miserably cold. To some readers, it might appear that the whole thing mattered more to random celebrity stalkers than the people of Frome, when the story-tale figure of a home-town hero materialised before us like the ghost of Christmas past. Yet it seemed somewhat meaningful to a younger me, that it must’ve meant enough to Jenson Button himself to come all this way, to do all this, just to be home in time for the Christmas lights.
Edited by Archie Lees