a portal

Thoughts on my birthday yesterday…

I had a very quiet day, lunch with Hilary out and then off to a book launch at UCL. We have a chapter in it. As I walked to the launch I came across the building behind behind me in this picture which is where my life in London started when I was probably 17 or 18.. so a while ago now by anyones calculations.

Outside UCL History department on 15 June 2022

I remember that I was a very idealistic kid longing to escape the confines of what I felt was quite a conservative and in many ways deeply & unjustifiably privileged upbringing.

I had a love of history and particular interest both in the Russian Revolution and in the history of Nazism. This was combined with a deeply held belief that history could teach us valuable lessons, which if learned & remembered could help us to create a better and fairer world for everyone. I believed in storytelling as a major force for good and the most potent way of intervening in unjust social, political and economic arrangements to provoke change.

Strangely looking back on this I now remember I had been told to read a book and prepare for a discussion with one of the historians from the department. How funny that the book had the title ‘The Embarrassment of Riches’ by Simon Shama. It was all about the Dutch boom in tulips as I remember and how they tried to try and hide their wealth from view.

The door behind me in this quick snap was a bit of a portal as it took me right into the heart of one of the top history departments in the country. I was interviewed by David d’Avray who I believe is still working in the department to this day, a prominent medieval historian with huge protruding eyebrows and someone who was almost always to be found lost in his own thoughts.

Professor David d’Avray

I remember feeling that I was attempting to bat quite a lot higher than my usual scores. This was for young minds of a calibre higher than my own. There it is, the complexity of life. Driven by ideals, undermined by feelings of inadequacy. But D’Avray and me got along so well that he not only offered me a place, he made it conditional on me getting appalling A-level grades, which I eventually did and the rest, to coin a phrase was history. I remember he asked me what I wanted to do and I said I’d like to either be a war photographer or a documentary filmmaker, to make people wake up and see that we had to change.

But yesterday, walking past the building on my birthday took me right back. And thinking about it this morning I’m struck by just how much has changed in the world since then and also in myself but also how much has stayed the same.

Let me clarify ;

1) I still believe that stories have the power to change the world; they contain our beliefs but the best ones also challenge us to rise to occasion and stand up and change / or be counted. So they change us ; and they are about change.

A major challenge is to give ourselves stories that simultaneously empower ourselves and help others.

2) I’m still making documentaries - despite the fact that I was pretty much just a kid when I laid out my grand plans.

3) When you look at time, and in fact the here and now, there’s a very strong illusion of permanence, so for instance we are now in a very dark and negative political and cultural moment in the UK. We have these awful policies of refugees being sent to Rwanda, we are destroying the world by drilling for oil and gas and throttling renewables etc; we have made terrible mistakes on almost every major choice. And so the whole atmosphere has changed dramatically since 1998 when I must have been doing that interview. We have gone from an era of Britpop and Blairist optimism to a deep sense of despair, and yet due to the nature of time, all this too will pass.

I think history is a process of mass emotional change, forces clashing together, sometimes in fact almost always chaotically.

And inside of that great cataclysm, our job is to find meaning and purpose for ourselves, our friends and families.. and to try and help to shape this great tide.

This remains as the great challenge no matter whether you were born back in medieval times or more recently like us..

We need to be very careful when it comes to the stories we tell ourselves, as they shape who we are - both as individuals and as communities !