ANOTHER VOICE
On how history, like buddleia, is easily lost to us
MATTHEW PARRIS
The buddleia in London is fading now, but it was a fantastic July for buddleia this year — the best I can remember. All along the railway tracks the way was crowded with mauve, deep purple or white blooms. Trains to Southend and Chelmsford seemed almost to be pushing through flow- ers, and the butterflies, which love bud- dleia, were everywhere. From every crack in the old brickwork or leaking gutters an adventitious shoot, root or blossom has seemed to be lodged. The hardy persistence through adversity of buddleia in London is one of the small miracles of nature. Even in Derbyshire those mauves and indigos pushed through. Others may remember the early summer of 1998 for Serbian aggres- sion in Kosovo, Cronygate in Tony Blair's Labour party, stock market panics on Wall Street or a birth, illness, marriage or death in their own families, but for me the memo- ry of buddleia has most indelibly marked the season.
Nor for me alone, I think. A July profu- sion of buddleia in England is one of those public events which are private events because, though millions note and inwardly record, each of us does it alone. It has not been nor will it ever be on the news that this was a marvellous year for buddleia. There is no national consensus about it. There could be: were we asked we might agree, but we have not been asked; nothing has been announced and (beyond articles like this, written upon a whim) there exists no system for noting quite notable sideshows as the earth spins on in its orbit. They therefore pass almost unrecorded, big at the time, remarkable in their way, yet unremarked and unknown by the succeed- ing age.
When my namesake, Matthew Paris, the monk of St Albans, set out in 1259 to write a history of the world from the Creation, through the Flood, to 1259, one of the rea- sons he wrote was because he believed the task had hardly been attempted. If he — or somebody — did not write it all down, much might be forgotten and lost forever. The diary he also wrote of his times in Eng- land was (he correctly believed) the only record being kept of a good deal of con- temporary history.
We flatter ourselves that we have come a long way since then. Every Thames tide at London Bridge is recorded; every weather reading kept for posterity; Cabinet minutes note each discussion; all books published are placed in the Bodleian; at Colindale every issue of every newspaper can be retrieved on microfiche, and the entire out- put of the BBC is presumably recorded and stored in archives. It is easy to gain the impression that someone, somewhere, is capturing every modern moment; and that future historians will be able to return to August 1998 and examine it in every detail, just as it was — is — for us now.
But this is not so. Were passing events the whole passage of time, from the move- ment of a cloud to the fall of a bomb, or a sparrow — reducible digitally to a huge but finite number of discrete data, it is probably the case that not a millionth part is being recorded. The rest — almost everything which happens — goes immediately beyond recall. It is lost, forgotten.
Will the coming age know, for instance — will they be able to find out — that by 1998 almost nobody was hitch-hiking in Britain any more? Not 20 years ago the slip-roads up to the Ml and the exits to every motorway service area were busy with hitch-hikers, sporting felt-tip-pen advice on cardboard as to their desired destination. Where did they go, these beggars of rides? Is it a sign of modern affluence, or of per- ceived danger, or of latter-day pride that young people no longer hitch-hike? Is it recorded anywhere?
In the early 1980s, the colour turquoise suddenly exploded into fashionability. I remember that men were even wearing turquoise socks. Then the fashion passed. Where? When? Why? Does anybody keep figures about these things?
And have you noticed the demise of the home-made sandwich? Children used to take a packed lunch to school, office work- ers used to make their own sandwiches and take them in. Now everybody buys shop- made sandwiches, which are often delicious but vastly more expensive than making your own. Why have we stopped? When did the `Mine's signed by the author too.' decline start? Is anybody tracking this and writing it down?
Then there is that phrase 'package of measures'. I see that the new Japanese Prime Minister has just 'unveiled' a 'pack- age of measures'. Packages of measures started to come in toward the end of Mar- garet Thatcher's time (around the time the word 'excellence', which achieved a sudden and unexplained fashionability in the mid- Eighties, was beginning to peak). John Major was always unveiling packages of measures — or, rather, putting them in place, for 'putting in place' became chic parliamentary language at that time too. Perhaps it was a symptom of a dawning age in which big ideas no longer loomed, but the taste for big phrases persisted. A pack- age of measures is a way of grouping together a great many small and often fairly unrelated ideas and, by throwing round them a linguistic corral, giving shape, size and a certain pretension to the otherwise unremarkable.
Did anybody notice the birth of 'excel- lence' or the growth of the 'package of measures'? Is anyone keeping a record? When did financial boffins start talking about 'numbers' instead of 'figures' (`these numbers will please the City') — and why?
Why, too, are men tucking in their shirts again? A couple of years ago I suddenly noticed that nobody under 25 was doing so. Who started this, and when? Why is the practice ceasing? When did it peak? Has anybody written down the answers to such questions? How many once widely appreci- ated aspects of our age are slipping, even as I write, beyond the grasp of the succeeding age? As John Peyton wrote in his wonder- ful autobiography, we reach into the past, into memory, as a hand might reach into a tank of fish, grasping for something that was rich and colourful at the time — but withdraw our fist to find only bits of sand and weed.
Unless you believe in the mind of God, you could argue that in one powerful sense that which is lost beyond all hope of recov- ery actually ceases to exist. Silly, but, like Brother Paris, I wanted to write it down about the buddleia, in case nobody else has — and to stop the phenomenon being expunged from time.
Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.
Previous page
