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What's New?
8 September 2024 Yesterday I had great pleasure in attending the conference of the Historical Novel Society at Dartington Hall. Such occasions are a joy because they are a stream of meaningful conversatiosn with like-minded people. I was there to do a job, however, and not just chat. I gave a short after-dinner speech on one of my pet subjects, our old public houses. But my prime role was to give a talk to the assembled gathering. I chose the title, 'Free History: how to ride the waves of time'; the text is available in the Notes & Essays section of this website - or go there directly by clicking this link.
13 August 2024 A week ago, I rejoined social media - I am now on Threads. I had stopped using Twitter the day that Musk took over. I have to say, my hesitancy to rejoin that social-media world seemed wholly justified almost immediately, as the first reply I received to my first Threads message said 'Personally, I think we could all have done without you rejoining social media'. Which was charming. But then some pleasant messages rolled in, including some pics of people's collections of my books, which made me feel a little more positive. Someone then tried to have a go at me for saying that Elon Musk had 'infected Twitter' - telling me Musk 'only gave the right wing a chance of having their say without undue censorship' (or words to that effect). I was having none of that. Musk is inseperable from his self-centredness and irresponsibility. I had just heard my wife (who works in online safety) tell me how she had tried officially to have a video removed from Twitter that showed a family (a father and two children) being killed by hanging. Twitter told her the video would stay because it did not violate any of their policies. Fortunately the person who posted the video was persuaded to remove it himself. But Twitter's irresponsible institutional extremism is horrific. It is down to Musk personally - it was his decision to sack the trust and safety teams around the world and to rip up what safeguarding guidelines they had in place. The person who objected to my 'infected Twitter' comment came back at me to tell me there was no issue, it was just that I 'did not want to watch some videos'. Honestly, it's like we're going to bring back public executions in the interest of free speech. Anyway, prompted by this exchange, today I finally got around to removing all the links and logos pointing to my old Twitter account from this website and my Time Traveller's Guides one. Oh, sorry, it's no longer Twitter, is it? It's an X - the traditional mark of an illiterate person.
12 July 2024 Two days ago I paid my first visit for forty years to Wilton House, near Salisbury. The last time I went I was fifteen or sixteen, with my parents. I was astonished. Normally I find I have forgotten much in the interim. But here I remembered so much - the double-cube room most of all, but also the canopied bedchamber near it, Rembrandt's portrait of his mother, the single cube room, the first floor gallery around the cloister-like interior, the beautiful bridge over the river, the massive Van Dyck painting of the royal family above the sofa in the double-cube room. Forty years? It could have been yesterday. It was a pleasant correction to my assumption that my memory is constantly getting worse.
29 May 2024 Very pleased today to sign the contract for Mortimer's A-Zs of English History with Old Street Publishing. A brief synopsis is here. When I have a provisional publishing date, I will let you know.
25 May 2024 Friends of ours in Moretonhampstead, Liz and Laurent, run the Van du Pain - a magic yellow French van from which they sell the most superb French bread and patisserie, fruit and savoury tarts, sourdough loaves, baguettes, croissants, etcetera. It's become quite an attraction on Saturday mornings. I could not help but smile when I saw the size of the queue this morning.
19 May 2024 I'm slower than ever but I'm still able to run a half marathon. And very pleased today to be beaten by the biggest margin yet by my eldest son, Alexander (13 minutes). Soon he'll beat my best time at the Bristol Half (1 hr 38 mins). That will be a day for a party. It will be an even bigger party if I ever get back to that speed again. And to think I ran that fast only three years ago. Alas, what deep wounds the years inflict on us!
15 April 2024 I had a very positive experience over the last couple of days speaking at Gloucester History Festival's spring weekend. My talk was entitled 'Why the Middle Ages matter', which (unusually for me) I did as an illustrated presentation. The opportunity to show a reconstructed eleventh-century nobleman's house and comparing it with an early-sixteenth-century equivalent and asking if anyone could 'spot the difference' was too much for me to resist. Likewise comparing the British Library's Anglo-Saxon map of the known world and comparing it with Abraham Ortelius's atlas. A full house too, which is always good to see. As part of the festival, I took part in a special podcast for History Rage. My theme - in response to the question, which one historical thing do you wish everyone would stop believing? - was that Edward II died in Berkeley Castle in 1327. What actually happened was far more interesting - and essential to understanding English diplomatc history in the mid-fourteenth century and how knowledge is formed in the modern world. You can listen to this at the History Rage podcast page.
31 March 2024 Here we are already at the end of the first quarter of 2024. I can't believe time has flown by so quickly. What have I been doing these the last three months? I have been working on my big, 4-year project to survey all the medieval pubs in the country - and all the supposedly medieval ones - for a substantial volume on our drinking heritage. I have been pushing two books that I wrote last year towards publication. I have started researching the history of the Drewe Arms, a pub in Drewsteignton (Devon), which has successfully been bought by the community and which opened its doors again recently. This pub is a national treasure; it is completely unmodernised, having been run by Mabel Mudge from 1919 until 1994. I am so glad it has been saved. It is the perfect example of what a village pub should be. I have given some more attention to the death of Edward II problem and the misleading statements still circulated about that event by academics (despite the proof that our knowledge of the suppsed event rests on unreliable information being published in the scholarly press in 2005). And I have been making progress on my current project, The History of England through the Windows of an Ordinary House. This last-mentioned project now takes centre stage: I should finish it at the end of the year.
30 March 2024 It made me smile to look on amazon.co.uk this morning and see that my study of medieval social change is ranked at no. 9 on the Kindle bestsellers list. On which note, American readers might be interested to know that the audiobook - read by me - will be published by Tantor on 23 April.
16 February 2024 People who have read my running book, Why Running Matters, will know I have been a big fan of parkrun since 2015. However the deletion of records of all sorts on the orders of the chief executive, Russ Jefferys, has hugely disappointed me. The organisation was always run on a strict fall-into-line-or-else basis, which meant there was always a risk of an absolutist taking it in the wrong direction. And that has now happened. All the records relating to age grades have gone, so you and I can no longer try to break the record for a local parkrun for, say, men aged 55-59. But nor can we admire the records of those who are the fastest. I can no longer compare myself to the best. We are not allowed to know what excellence is - in the pursuit of Mr Jeffery's idea of 'inclusivity'. See here for details. But it is not just about records. All those people who challenged themselves to do, say the most different parkruns, or 100, or 250 different parkruns - parkrun tourism, a rewarding hobby for those who joined the various clubs to achieve these goals - have seen their entire achievement deleted. In the name of inclusivity. Those who were 789th on the list of the 1,000 best performances at their local parkrun - and believed that their achievement would be there to be seen, freely available, forever - have now seen their lifetime-best performance deleted. In the name of inclusivity. It saddens me. I used to say the brilliance of parkrun was its ability to contain all sorts: if you want to be competitive, it provides you with a forum for that competitive instinct to be realised in a fub way. If you don't want to be competitive, you can walk, jog, bring your dog or whatever. and if you're somewhere between the two - i.e. competitive but not serious - it is ideal for you too. Not any more: it is no longer inclusive of people with a range of visions of what they want from it. In taking away the records of achievement, Mr Jefferys has taken away the very ability to achieve. For many people, he has taken away the very reason to run a parkrun in the first place. He says that parkrun 'only exists to bring people together', so why take away the focus that gives meaning to that coming together? In my world, this is like saying everyone can write history, regardless of how well they can handle primary sources or determine accuracy, and no version of the past is better than any other - in the name of inclusivity. The fact is that you don't make everyone equal by destroying the ability to achieve. You just denigrate human achievement and treat everyone as meaningless as an individual. Tomorrow I will do parkrun, in Gloucester. But only because I am staying locally and want to say to those organising it that I appreciate what efforts they are going to, despite Mr Jefferys taking them for granted while stripping away much of the value of their volunteering.
19 January 2024 Earlier this week I recorded a podcast episode for The Lede, part of New Lines magazine, with the brilliant Dr Lydia Wilson. What a pleasure to be interviewed by someone who really knows her medieval stuff, comes at the Middle Ages from a different temporal perspective and is prepared to challenge me on some key points. It makes the whole event a little more edgy, more dynamic and more enjoyable (for all concerned, I think). The editorial team have turned it around in double-quick time and now you can listen to it here.
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