One Day in History

Today, October 17th has been set aside by the National Trust as a day in which thousands of ordinary people across the UK will recount their day for a mass blog-in that will be registered for posterity in the British Museum.

Normally, I don’t write about myself or my daily goings-on with the notable exception of some of the meals I cook. Besides being a fairly private person for the most part, I simply do not generally enjoy writing. This isn’t to say that I don’t write - I do frequently in my work. I write design documents, concept documents, marketing blurb, press releases, sometimes even back stories for the games I work on. Nevertheless, whilst I do consider myself a decent writer (I can write grammatically correct, understandable prose), I don’t think I’m necessarily a good or creative writer. Like many of my skills, I have my moments, but I’m very much a jack rather than a master. So this is a novelty for me, to be honest.

Part of the remit for the One Day in History blog is to reflect upon the ways that history itself impacted on one’s day. This bit is not difficult. History is always a part of my life - because, of course, without the past behind us, the present simply wouldn’t have occurred. We exist precisely because our forbearers and their experiences existed and those events have inextricably shaped our lives. But on a more personal level, history is a special interest, whether it’s family history, world history, art history or archaeology And whilst history is generally reserved for the human bits, palaeontology is as relevant as the rest. It’s certainly as fascinating.

My day started with a bit of a lounge in the still warm, but weakening October sunshine, skimming through In the Blink of an Eye: How Vision Kick-started the Big Bang of Evolution. This was, by the way, as much a work task as it was a pleasure. Working from home means my choice of working environment is down to my whim and if there’s a sunny day, I’ll take advantage of it. For better or worse, they seem to be less rare than in previous years. I won’t complain, though I probably should.

So, even though this book is about pre-human evolution (specifically the Cambrian Explosion), there are the odd bits of human history that inevitably crop up. The one that caught my eye was little anecdote, that, like so many things in my life recently, led from one interesting concept to another. The author told the story of how Sir Edward Bagnall Poulton, upon entering the Huxley Room at Oxford University’s Natural History Museum, happened to notice a beam of sunlight illuminating a brilliant blue Sumatran carrion beetle. This chance meeting of man and insect led Poulton to eventually publish a classification of colour in animals that inspired a century of research into the subject - the subject I’m now researching.

Interestingly, The Huxley Room was the location of The Great Debate of 1860 which saw Thomas Huxley defend Darwin’s Origin of Species to Bishop Willberforce in an attempt to ‘prevent sentiment interfering with intellect’.

And so, on that note and with one third of the day complete, I’m off into town to get some historical and scientific inspiration from Charles Darwin and his lovely Cambridge University that just happens to be on my very doorstep. Darwin, by the way, said in his autobiography, that whilst much of his early years at Cambridge were wasted in hunting, shooting and drinking with the local sporting set, “no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them, and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow.”

I’m seeing this as a three-part series, for anyone who can be bothered to read it…

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