Remember, Remember this 5th of November

I’m writing this on November 5th 2024, the day the USA will vote to decide who will be their next President. By the time you read this, the result will likely be known and I may well add an update at the end. In the meantime, like a great many people, I am holding my breath for the result of what has been called ‘the most consequential election in the history of the world.’ Hyperbole maybe, but it does feel as if we are living inside a moment in time which is likely to enter the history books as a truly epochal event.

Which is strange because, usually, we don’t know that such an epochal event has occurred until (sometimes long) after it has happened. 

From an early age I was always fascinated by history. At school when we studied the Ancient Britons or the Roman Empire, my imagination would take flight and I would wonder what it felt like to be a child wearing rabbit skins and living in a cave, or (perhaps better) being the offspring of an Emperor in Rome, living in an Imperial palace with beautiful mosaics adorning the walls. 

I’ve spent years of my life studying history both to advanced level at school and as part of a degree I studied as a mature student in the 1980s. Since then I have read many brilliant historical novels like Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety about the French Revolution, and I am so looking forward to The Mirror and the Light on BBC One on Sunday 10th November, the final book in Mantel’s excellent trilogy about Thomas Cromwell.

One of my all time favourite podcasts is The Rest is History with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Each episode is around an hour long and the erudite and entertaining pair of presenters often tell the story of the epochal event over several episodes. Their choice of subject matter seems to have no discernible pattern and zig-zags erratically from the Life and Times of Lord Byron (truly ‘mad,bad and dangerous to know), to the Rise of the Nazis to Custer’s Last Stand. 

What is utterly sublime is the way that Holland and Sandbrook turn all these moments in time into compelling narratives accompanied by a huge dollop of very dry British humour. Their current period of study covers the assassination of Martin Luther King. Nothing amusing there you may think except for the fact that his killer, James Earl Ray, briefly escaped after the killing to Earl’s Court and ended up robbing a TSB branch in Fulham - who knew?

The book I’ve just started reading isn’t an historical novel but it does involve the rather interesting conceit of a community of older people who have all developed the ability to time travel in their later years - but they can ‘only’ travel backwards to earlier times and as observers, not as active participants. So, if the central character Aggie May, found herself watching Gavrilo Princip, she would not be able to stop him assassinating Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, thereby possibly preventing the ‘shot heard around the world’ which triggered the First World War. The book is called The Better Angels and was recommended by one of our American film club members as something that I might enjoy and she’s right! I am finding it both intriguing and thought provoking. 

However it has also made me realise that, as a lover of history, I have always had a well-developed consciousness of the past and often travel back there in my imagination. It has also given me a strong desire to understand what led to those seismic events which rocked the world. That’s why The Rest is History podcasts are so fascinating, because Sandbrook and Holland always start with the straws in the wind and show how often chance events or encounters played a role in someone’s rise to power or their ultimate downfall. 

It also explains how and why demoralised people can be manipulated and persuaded, sometimes to do truly dreadful things like guillotining their monarch And the other thing that history has taught me is that nostalgia, combined with a desire to turn back the clock to some place in the past where we imagine (or are persuaded) that everything was better, is both beguiling and dangerous. I would also suggest that nostalgia gradually becomes more and more seductive the older we get.

I think there are several very understandable reasons for this. First, the older you are, the more memories you have. I love reminiscing about my own past, especially to my grandchildren. Secondly, the present may have become a more uncomfortable place to live and we just want to return to a time when we felt more at home. 

I have two people in my life like that, both of whom are hovering around 80. One no longer goes to the golf club where he played for years and has a wide range of friends because they have instituted an online booking system and he refuses to learn how to use a computer to book a game. The other has a mobile phone which is so old that the battery only works when plugged in. Without an upgrade which she angrily refuses to get, the phone is no longer ‘mobile.’

The third reason for creeping nostalgia as we age is that we may become less progressive in our attitudes and less open to new ways of doing things the older we get. The modern world becomes baffling with its weird music, embrace of gender fluidity, obsession with being constantly on TikTok and Youtube and myriad language pitfalls. I often hear the heartfelt cry on Facebook “you can’t open your mouth these days without offending someone” and I feel their pain. But the sad truth is that the world will keep turning in a particular direction whether we like it or not. We may long for some imagined past where everything was better, but, unlike Aggie May, we have no way of going back there, however briefly.

Which brings me finally to what history teaches us are the dangers of nostalgia. Nine years ago there was a referendum on whether we should ‘take back control’ and leave the European Union. There were enough people who were persuaded that we could somehow return, in Houseman’s words, to our ‘land of lost content’ where everything was so much better and we could get back there with no economic cost and no downsides. The result has been very different from what was promised because, except in the movies,  time moves inexorably forwards not backwards.

And now we have the results of the election in the USA delivered under the promise to Make America Great Again. Once more there is that nostalgic sense of restoring something that enough American people believe has been lost and which can be regained with Donald Trump as their president. For the sake of the great country of America and for the rest of the world, it is devoutly to be wished that they are proved right.

However, the study of history teaches us that In every era there have always been winners and losers and, however much we desire it, there really is no going back, we have to deal with the reality of the world as it is right now. So, I suspect that we are going to “Remember, Remember this 5th November” as a moment in our history that turned out to have seismic consequences for all of us.

Tricia x

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