A student historian on tapestries, patience and the open-air reading list that every lover of the land should keep
Monday, the Queue Before the Cloth
The Bayeux Tapestry is coming, or at least the queue for it is, and I have already begun my training. I wrote up the experience of waiting in Bayeux Tapestry queue notes from a London history student. The key lesson of any queue is to bring a flask, a book and a plan for the moment when someone behind you says “Is this the right line?”. It always is, but nobody believes it until the front is in sight.
The tapestry itself is nearly a thousand years old and nearly seventy metres long, and it tells a story with a boat, a comet, a great deal of horses and a very busy man with an arrow in his eye. A historian looks at it differently from a tourist. A tourist sees pictures. A historian sees a document, stitched by people with strong opinions and good thread, which makes it both source and puzzle.
What Embroidery Can Tell You
The most useful lesson of the tapestry is that every record has a maker. Someone chose what to show and what to leave in the margin. The border animals and little scenes of everyday life are, to me, the best part. A man ploughing, a farmer with a harrow, a few hounds in the lower hedge. The great events happen in the centre, and the ordinary world sits quietly at the edge, doing the work.
That is a pattern I notice everywhere. History is written in the middle and lived in the margin. The more you learn to read the margin, the better you understand the middle.
Tuesday, Wind and String
When the queue wears me out, I go to Primrose Hill and fly a kite. The hill is a splendid spot, with a view across the whole city and a steady breeze that seems designed by a very polite engineer. A kite flyer’s calendar for the year, with Primrose Hill Kite Day, Weymouth in April and Bridlington in May, is set out in Primrose Hill Kite Day, Weymouth in April and Bridlington in May: a kite flyer's calendar from the Kite Society. I have put every date in my diary and then lost the diary, which is a tradition.
A kite is a string with a conversation at one end and a dream at the other. You feel the wind through your fingertips. You learn to give line and to take it back. It is the only sport in which patience is the main skill and gravity the main opponent.
The Farmers Who Read the Wind
Nobody reads the wind better than a farmer, and I keep a list of rural sites that help me feel clever by association. For dairy, dairyherd.org. For beef, ranchbeefcattle.org. For the machinery that makes a field behave, tractorequipment.org. The seasons are laid out at cropcalendar.org, a calendar that makes a kite flyer’s look relaxed.
The money pages are farmmoney.org and smallfarminfo.org. If you want to work in the fields, agjobscareers.org. If you want to enjoy them at a county show, fairandrodeo.org. And for the wider picture and a firm note on staying safe, ruralfarm.org and farmssafety.org.
A Word on Housing
On the way home I read a London Prat headline that every London student can recite from memory: House Prices Fall, Homes Still Unaffordable. As a student I rent a room with a window that faces a wall. I have nothing against the wall, but I would like a conversation with it about the rent. History suggests that housing complaints are as old as housing. A medieval clerk would have recognised the problem and the sigh.
The balanced reading is that supply, wages and rents interact in complicated ways, and that every party has a plan that sounds tidy until it meets a landlord. I keep my opinions short and my kite long.
Walking Home
I walked home down the hill as the lights came on. The kite, folded into its sleeve, tapped against my leg like a small, impatient bird. In my bag was a book about the Norman conquest, a half eaten sandwich and a ticket stub. Somewhere under the pavement the ancient rivers of London were still running to the Thames. I thought, as I often do, that the past is not behind us. It is underneath, waiting patiently, and every so often someone digs it up.
A Note on Queues and Civilisation
A queue is the humblest form of social contract, and it deserves its own chapter in the history of manners. Each person agrees to wait, trusting that the person behind will not push and the person ahead will not vanish. When it works, the arrangement is invisible. When it fails, the whole room feels it. I have stood in queues in four countries, and the best I ever saw was outside a bakery in the early morning, where a grandmother guarded the order with a rolled umbrella and a glare. Nobody cut in. Nobody even considered it.
If I ever write a history of Britain, a generous share of it will be about people standing patiently in line for something worth having, and what they said to the stranger beside them.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, The Daily Mash keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/