History isn’t bunk, Mr Ford, and I wish I knew far more of it

What with one thing and another - leaving Britain in June 1959 when I was nine to go and live in Berlin (after my father was posted there by the BBC), attending German schools for the next four years, returning to Britain in July 1963 and starting at a RC boarding school (which was then by no means of the first order), my education was in many ways quite patchy to downright bad.

For example, I began Latin at Das Canisius Kolleg in Berlin-Tiergarten when I started as a Sextaner (as in Sextanerblase) in late August 1964. Lessons were quite straightforward and methodical (our textbook as Ludus Latinus - the Latin game). I did Latin for the next three years, progressing from I don’t know what to I don’t know what - I have since forgotten most, though not all of it - and when we returned to Britain and I started at the Oratory School in Woodcote in early September 1963 I carried on with Latin. Except that I didn’t carry on at all - I came to an abrupt halt.

In Latin at the OS, we were pitched straight into Virgil’s Aeneid, and to this young German kid who spoke with an impeccable English accent but was, in fact, German, it was complete gobbledegook, blank bloody nonsense. Whereas our Latin classes in Berlin (Das Canisius Kolleg was and is a Jesuit college) it had been a slow and methodical progression of learning verbs and tenses, nouns, genders and cases, and slowly building up an notion of what the language might be, Latin at the OS as in reading and translating large chunks of ‘Virgil’ was a mystery to me, and moreover a mystery which my three years of learning the basics of Latin grammar in Berlin did bugger all to solve.

All of my fellow intake at the OS in 1963 - except me - had attended a English prep school and had already been immersed into Virgil, so the Latin classes were simply a continuation of what they had so far been learning. I’m not suggesting that they all knew a great deal more than me, but at least it what we were going through in class wasn’t utterly baffling. I can remember nothing about the classes - and even less about the Aeneid and Virgil except that he also be also wrote a long poem about farming and another about bee-keeping.

That when it came to grammar Latin nouns were declined differently in both countries didn’t help, either: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and ablative in Germany but in England nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative. As for pronunciation, Lord help me. I had learned the German way of pronouncing Latin and the English way sounded hideous, and I never got used to it.

My education in history - any history - was worse: abysmal to non-existent. We did none at the The Sacred Heart, the RC primary school in Henley and none at my first German school, Steubenschule, in Berlin-Charlottenburg (and that is what I remembered it was called, not die Steubenschule, though I can’t find anything on the net to check either way.)

Then for the next three years at Das Canisius Kolleg it was ‘ancient history’ starting with - as far as I remember - Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome. Quite why I can’t suggest. Why no German history? They had as much of history as everyone else but preferred to start us off in 700BC, so, no, it was ‘ancient Rome’ and I can

remember nothing. So when I landed at the OS I and ‘had history’, I was pitched straight into the doings of some dude called Henry VII (left) and his Court of Star Chamber. And that, dear friends, was it. I’m sure we also did history in fifth-form but I remember absolutely nothing.

Since then I have over the years picked up a lot more and do know a little. We also did history as part of my five-strand foundation course at Dundee University, but all I can remember of that is that if our lecturer used the phrase ‘and at the end of the day’ once, he bloody used it 1,000 times.

The irony is that I find history interesting and the more I know, and the more I know about the different approaches to history and what we can draw from knowing it, the more interesting I find it. A few years ago I became acutely aware that I knew no history at all and went on a self-designed crash course of getting to know more British and Continental history, and read a number of books in a series called ‘The Plantagenets’, ‘The Tudors’, ‘The Stuarts’, that kind of thing. The series wasn’t called this, but might well have had the rather twee title of ‘Adventures In History’ or some such, they usually do when you are still at the 2 x 2 = 4 level I was operating on. But I’m not proud. At least I acquired a broad outline of what the bloody hell happened in Britain between ‘the Dark Ages’ and the 19th century.

. . .

I brought up history because it has one very distinct advantage over current affairs: to a large extent it is ‘over’. All right, that is obviously a gross simplification and I can already hear various bores clearing their throats, murmuring ‘are you sure?’ and readying themselves for a long and arcane historiographical discussion, but I’d rather not to into that here, if you don’t mind. My point has more to do with how little we know - and in a sense can know - about what is going on now, this week, this month, this year. (Incidentally, whenever a discussion such as this comes up, there is alway some wiseacre who resorts to quoting what is now a sodding cliche by the philosopher George Santayana. I shall not be quoting it.)

Yes, we know the ‘facts’ but it is the relevance of those facts and what underlying trend we might discern which is bloody difficult. If we were to look at say what the Brits call ‘The Glorious Revolution’ when William of Orange was invited to invade the country and usurp the throne, we can try to trace what happened, who did what - for example, the ineptitude of James II - and suggest various patterns. Can anyone really do that at the moment? Can anyone - although many try, almost always for good money coughed up by a media which should know better - really tell us ‘what’s going on’?

In the US the nation is into its second year of the erratic and bewildering presidency of Donald Trump. You reading this might disagree, but I am far more inclined to agree with the analysis that the man is a narcissistic, sociopath who has the world view of a dim New York cabbie. Furthermore, as far as I am concerned his baffling subservience to Russia and Vladimir Putin is easily explained if one accepts the overwhelming likelihood that he is deeply, deeply, deeply in debt to various Russian billionaires. That is certainly not ‘a fact’, but a real probability.

Here in Britain we are also in deep shit. I am not about to launch into a ‘Brexit - right or wrong’ discussion, mainly because that is now irrelevant. What is relevant is that next March (or possibly later if wiser heads prevail and the government asks for the date to be postponed so a few more ducks can be put in the row) we shall be leaving the EU.

Well, quite apart from no one having the faintest clue what the economic result of that might be - and I are thoroughly persuaded things are really not looking good - the political setup her in Britain is in no state to deal with what could become a constitutional crisis. Both of our major parties, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, are in complete disarray and pretty much split down the middle. (That happens to both parties periodically, but never at the same time.)

Abroad the far-right is gaining ground in several countries, most notably in the general election last night in Sweden. They didn’t do quite as well as was expected by many, but they did well enough. It’s not that they might be part of the next Swedish government - both the right-of-centre and left-of-centre blocs say they will have nothing to do with them in a possible coalition - but that the number of Swedish citizens who are won over by their illiberal arguments has grown and might grow even more.

Germany, too, has its far-right problem, mainly in the former East Germany, and although I believe its democratic sinews are as strong as in any other Western European country, it is not a problem which can be ignored.

Elsewhere, we have the growing totalitarianism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Putin (who has just raised the pension age in Russia) facing street protests, China having to deal with the apparent megalomania of Xi Jinping (but he is having to deal with the fact that his - what amounts to a - power grab is not going quite as easily as he hoped, Libya is falling apart, Egypt is getting restless again (a Lebanese woman visiting who complained publicly of the day-to-day sexual harassment of women in the country was jailed for eight years. Today’s news is that her sentence has been reduced to one year and that she has been released, although I am hazy on the details).

Historians - or even common or garden bloggers of my ilk - alive and at work in 2218 will have a fair idea of what was going on. They might point to the increasing liberalisation of Western Europe once World War II ended, a process which seemed to culminate in the end of the Soviet bloc and the emancipation of its various client states in Eastern Europe. That event even persuaded one historian, Francis Fukuyama, to publish a book with the title The End Of History. How different it all looks now.

In the US there seems to be very real talk of what can only be described - but which never would be - of a coup d’etat to remove Trump from office before he does something really, really stupid (At the height of his spat

Vice-President Mike Pence indicates how long the knife should be he would like
to bury in Trump’s back (for the sake of the American people, of course)

with North Korea, he is said to have wanted to ‘go in there and fucking kill’ Kim Jung Un. And he was all for the US invading Venezuela and had to be talked out of it by his staff.

The Western World traditionally pays little attention to South America and what is going on there, mainly, I suppose, because what does go on there has little effect on what happens in its own world (folk who like to bang on about butterflies flapping their wings in the Amazon rainforest notwithstanding), but there, too, seems to be something of a sea change in affairs. In Brazil, by far the biggest country, the presidential candidate ahead in the polls is actually sitting in a jail cell and his biggest opponent belongs to the far-right. And given Brazil penchant for resorting to military rule when and if, the Western World might be better advised to pay more attention.

Finally, of course, there’s the ticklish matter of ‘global warming’. It would seem to be real and ongoing, although I still can’t rid myself of the suspicion that a kind of apocalypsarianism is partly at play - folk love a disaster, although not one in their own backyard.

I shall be 69 on November 21 and I am keenly aware that we ageing folk are often inclined to doom-monger, so I am doing my best not to. But in many ways it isn’t looking quite as good as it did when the smug gits in the EU organised parades for the introduction of the euro and were pretty much convinced that Nirvana was just around the corner. Was it hell.