This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
It's always easy when imagining history to assume that people spoke and acted differently from the way they do now. And, of course, that's largely true, in the sense that the language is permanently changing and that different fixations worm their ways into our day-to-day lives. But that's not to say attitudes have changed all that much.
According to many, many Facebook memes, Cicero once wrote, "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." I am not a Classics scholar so will hold my hands up and say that I haven't verified whether this quote is accurately attributed, or whether someone else wrote it. But the fact remains: people don't change. Everyone looks back on a previous time and thinks things were so much better then. The film Midnight In Paris explores this perfectly.
So, it's always wonderful when you find a historical series which doesn't take itself too seriously and, in the process, is accidentally just as (or more) accurate as many which do. Therefore, my historical series for the month of September is Blackadder.
I was introduced to this series very young, because we had the episodes on cassette, so could listen to them as an audio. Phrases like, "I have a cunning plan" became entrenched in British popular culture throughout the 90s and into the 00s. Now, they seem retro, I suppose.
What you have in Blackadder is a group of actors who have sparky chemistry, which is reflected in the way their characters deal with one another. From the early depiction of the War of the Roses to that famously traumatising final scene in Blackadder Goes Forth, the characters bumble and plot their way through various - usually successful - attempts to avoid disaster.
And they constantly snipe at each other, and this sniping almost certainly happened. There's a wonderful line where Blackadder says, "Don't say tush, Percy. Only stupid actors say tush. It's only one step from tush to hey nonny nonny, and then I'm afraid I will have to call the police." Here, they target the idea that Shakespeare's English may have been just that, rather than the general language of the day.
People snipe, people use pretentious language to make themselves seem important, people ride roughshod over others so that they can make it to the top... Nothing changes in the day-to-day living of lives. So, we may as well find a laugh or two (or, really, many many more!) in the process of this realisation!
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