living in unprecedented times

notes from my writing desk

It feels strange to be editing a book set partly during World War One as the rolling news tells us of horrors unfolding.

We have, it seems, been living in unprecedented times since at least 2016 and I know I’m not the only one who feels, especially after the events of the last few weeks, a desire to return to precedented times, when life felt slower, easier, when something enormous didn’t happen on a weekly basis.

But have such times ever really existed?

I look back on 2003/04 as a time when I was particularly happy. From a personal perspective things were going well in my life and career - I’d just bought my first flat, I had a job I really loved, my health, for once, wasn’t too bad. I had a life I enjoyed. But 2003 was also the year of the Iraq war (something I still have very strong feelings about), and it was the hottest summer since 1976 (a sign, in hindsight, of the increasingly hot summers yet to come).

We look back on things with rose-coloured spectacles, telling ourselves that things were better when…., and we forget, perhaps, that we didn’t have smartphones then, or rolling news flashing it’s doom-ridden headlines at us on a minute-by-minute basis. Things were different then, but not in the way that we think they were.

I’m a reader and I’m a writer in that order. I couldn’t write if I didn’t read, but more importantly I’m not sure I could understand the world if I didn’t read. I find my solace, my learning, my understanding from fiction. And so it turned out that during this unprecedented week that followed so many unprecedented weeks I was re-reading Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies.

For those of you that don’t know, this is the second book in Mantel’s phenomenal Thomas Cromwell trilogy (which I may or may not talk more about at a later date - more complicated feelings) and I picked it up in anticipation of the new BBC adaptation of The Mirror and the Light.

Bring Up the Bodies is about Henry VIII’s obsession with getting rid of his second wife, Anne Boleyn and the lengths he was happy to go to achieve that outcome (you all know how that story ended after all). It is a story of men taking away what little agency women had over their own lives and bodies, it is a story of the hypocritical way men treat women and the lies they will tell about them to get their own way. It is a story about the choices men make about women’s bodies and what women will do to survive.

And it couldn’t have been a better book to read during a week that felt hopeless to say the least.

I was struck, in particular, by this line:

It is an outrage to the rich and enterprising, to suggest that they should pay an income tax, only to put bread in the mouths of the workshy. And if Secretary Cromwell argues that famine provokes criminality; well, are there not hangmen enough?

It was as I read this that I realised that times have always been, perhaps, unprecdented and certainly unbearably difficult for various sections of society looked down upon by others. And that reading Bring up the Bodies on this week of all weeks, was exactly what I needed.

Immediately after the election results started to come through on 6 November my various social media timelines started filling up with suggestions for books to read and music to listen to that would help us escape, that would bring us hope, that would help us to understand.

And I was reminded of another unprecedented time, four and half years ago, as we all went into the first pandemic lockdown, and recommended films and books and TV shows to help us escape, to help us understand (there was a reason Shaun of the Dead was the most watched film on Netflix UK that spring) to bring us hope.

It has ever been thus and that is why we needs art, and words, and music now more than ever.

So now, the comments are yours to recommend anything you like for these perpetual unprecedented times.