1976 and all that

I hate those books and programmes on TV about mistakes in movies.  The ones that tell you that Matt Damon had his jacket undone when he set off running across some rooftops in Algiers in the Bourne Ultimatum but that when he landed it was done up.  And that there was the reflection of a camera crew in a window on Pride and Prejudice, or that Russell Crowe was wearing a wristwatch in Gladiator, or that the Morris Minor they used in Heartbeat wasn't made till 1973 but the episode was supposed to be set in 1971.

I know next to nothing about making movies but one thing I do know is this:  It's not easy.  I thought Avatar had a pretty rubbish story and I fell asleep in the middle of it, but I'm in no doubt it was technologically a major achievement and I'm pretty certain I couldn't have knocked it up in 5 minutes in my back garden with some leftover green paint and a couple of tall people.  And when James Cameron did Titanic he built a scale model of the ship and made it on some sort of tipping mechanism so he could tip it up at an angle for some of the filming.  

Recently I've seen the King's Speech and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and these were both set in the past in London and I was amazed at the historical detail, like the period cars and place names on the walls etc.  But I'm sure it won't be long before someone is telling me in a BBC3 clips programme that in the Wembley Stadium bit at the beginning of the King's Speech someone was wearing a bobble hat and they weren't invented until the seventies.  That was when I had one anyway.

I admire the effort that goes into films, because most days I struggle to even dress myself, never mind make a historically accurate blockbuster.  And as well as film-makers, I admire writers of history as well.  The writing I do is easy, because I just write whatever old crap comes into my head, but the process of writing historical books, whether fact or fiction must be a massively painstaking process, and the writing part only happens at the end, after tons and tons of research has been done.  I'm currently reading All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings about the Second World War, and it's a narrative of the whole war pieced together from first hand accounts and diary entries and that sort of thing.  And I think it's incredible the amount of work that must have gone into producing it.  But that's not the kind of writing I want to do, because I just like the writing part and I don't want to have to do boring stuff like checking facts.

When I was a child one of my favourite books was 1066 and all that by Sellar and Yeatman, and it was brilliantly funny.  I always remember that in the introduction it said 'History is not what you thought, it's what you can remember'.  At least I think it did.  I haven't checked.  I loved it because it told history with humour and if they had to bend the accuracy of some historical event to get a few jokes in, then they would.

Whenever I write anything, whether it's about going cycling or about growing up or whatever, it's not a balanced historical account of an event in the past, it's what I can remember, particularly if it seemed funny at the time.  For example, when I wrote about going for breakfast at Tan Hill, I spent a disproportionate amount of the ride report talking about the miserable woman with the urinal cubes.  Because she stuck in my head.  Even though it was a beautiful day and there was lots of beauty to describe if I only knew how to do it, I remember her better than the way the flowers looked or what birds I saw.  I don't have a framework of reference to hang these things on, but I can always remember crazy people. 

I often say that I remember the really hot summer of 1976.  But that's the thing.  I don't remember it.  Apart from it being bloody hot, I only remember one thing about it.  It was our first summer in the council house we got after my dad died, and I can remember sitting out in the parched front garden on the yellow grass in a stripey deck chair.  We lived at number 37.  The 16 year old boy who lived at number 18 had got the 15 year old girl from number 53 pregnant.  Our house was about halfway between their houses.  And the only thing I can really remember from that summer is that the family of the girl liked to chase the boy down our street a lot and shout abuse at him.  And I used to sit in the deck chair and watch.  

And from a whole summer that's it!  That's the only thing I can remember.  But I'm grateful for that memory, because it lets me know that I was there.  And if anybody mentions the hot summer of 1976 I can tell them that I remember it, even though I only remember the sun and the shouting.  1977 is a pretty similar story.  The only thing I can really remember is the Queen's Silver Jubilee, and the street party I went to, and the family next door but one (the ones who cut up their internal doors and put them on the fire) who arrived at a party in the height of summer in trenchcoats.  And it soon became clear why when they started shoving sandwiches and trifle into their pockets for later.  They would eat one sandwich and the coat would get another 5.  And I never saw anything like it again until the mad cake woman at the Waterstone's store opening in 1999 who swept an armful of cake into her bag.   But that's another story.....

 People often tell me I've got a good memory, because I can remember things they've forgotten.  Well, my way of remembering an event is to find someone who is doing something nuts and hang the memory of the event onto them.  It may not be historically accurate but it works for me..