Into the Past

I'm writing a new thing. It's based on an old thing I started writing years ago and abandoned. 

Abandoned is a bit strong. I started writing it and then what I thought was a career in theatre blew up, and I had to go off and do other things for a while, so I forgot about it. 

Even that's not right. It was always at the back of my mind, percolating, bubbling and burping, aged and soaked in the wine-butt that is my giant Easter Island head. Brexit and the pandemic were also a pair of heavy-handed midwives. 

I was sat in student accommodation in Coleraine (it was location work on a film I was making...yeah...) and I suddenly thought about time travel. Not about the science - the science is largely abstract and looks too much like maths for me to engage with. I run screaming from your sines and cosines, and your slippery slide rules. 

But I did think about the meat and potatoes synaesthesia of time travel. Breathing different air, under an older sun. The complications of human interaction in different societies, of peculiar mores and conventions, and the unacceptability of past behaviors. The Doctor, from Doctor Who, flits like a water-boatman over the surface tension of past earths, with a glibness that borders on the callous. He's in wars, sure, and he usually pulls a couple of people out, lucky them. But he's on earth in the seventies for years, and turns a blind eye to the systemic homophobia, sexism and racism that's all around him, all the operation Yewtree stuff that was an open secret. He doesn't get involved with society, he works on a trickle-down theory: if he saves a couple of people, maybe they'll tell another couple of people and maybe everything will organically get a bit cooler, yeah? 

Nice plan, Timelord: hippy Reagonomics. 

The fact is, despite the cosy fantasies of "the culturally conservative" we've never had it so good, and all other periods of time would prove impossible for modern people to deal with. We're so fat and lazy and cack-handed and specialised. You may have 100 k followers on Instagram, but your influencing skills will only go so far on a Tudor farm or an Aztec high altar. You wouldn't last five minutes: no money, no language skills, no notion of what's going on at either a micro or macro level. The entire experience would be dizzying, terrifying, ending abruptly and nastily. 

I like watching old films, particularly old British films. Not in a Morrissey way - I'm not that bothered by kitchen sink dramas: cat fights on the cobbles. I prefer BFI documentaries about hop picking in Kent after the war. That's my cup of...hops. Things like the extras on the remarkable "Here's to the Health of the Barley Mow" Blu-ray. Here you bear witness to the thinness and the camera-shyness of those village people, as they smile awkwardly with their original teeth, standing outside the small places they work. Later, nodding, laughing old blokes are sat outside the pub. They are beardy and called "dad" by all, and they're in their seventies in 1949, genuine post-war Victorians caught on film. Any one of them could be Jack the Ripper!* The pubs are ramshackle and uncomfortable men only affairs, the brickwork on the slide. There are old people and children in the village, but all the young people have already fucked off. No public transport - maybe a bus once a day. You're stuck there. Its contained, knowable - the village that Roger Livesey has trapped in his camera obscura at the start of A Matter of Life and Death. 

And then, occasionally, casually someone will say or do something inexplicable, something that is normal to them but which has no place in a modern frame of reference and you'll re-wind the film because you can't believe your eyes. The past is crawling with forgotten oddness. Pictures of Morris dancers from the turn of the previous century, waving sepia-toned hankies on long lost lawns, and caught forever as flickering celluloid ghosts. 

All perfectly normal

While I was working on my film, Goat Songs, we all had to wear masks all the time for Covid compliance, and initially I was determined that no one should wear one on camera. I reasoned that come the end of the pandemic - if the end ever comes - no one will ever want to see a mask again. I changed my mind when I suddenly realised that as an artifact the film could last forever, hidden away in a drawer, or whatever the distant future equivalent of a drawer is, and could be fished out again and viewed by curious eyes. Then they'll see someone suddenly whip out a mask as they enter a public space as though it were a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and they'll freak out, because they'll have no frame of reference for it. Unless, in the future, we're all wearing aqualungs all the time. 

There are no masks in my book, by the way. I wouldn't do that to you. It takes place forty years in the future. And, I think, several hundred years in the past. And all points in between. And time travel is difficult, confusing, immersive and weird. 

*If Jack the Ripper was born in 1868, making him twenty at the time of the murders, he'd be 81 in 1949. Unlikely, but...