'History is anything but dull...and the present proves it'

A few days ago I was talking to the young daughter of our next door neighbour about school, holidays and pink scooters, as you do!

I asked her what she liked about school and she told me that she liked “everything… except history, which is BOR-ING”.

And with that, Sophie hurtled off on her very own pink scooter.

Who’s not heard that plaintive cry before? That history is ‘boring’, looking back at things that happened years ago rather than what’s just around the corner.

I will confess that I, too, struggled with history as a subject at school. I just couldn’t engage with it because I couldn’t see any connection to me and my world.

That changed with two episodes though.

The first was watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 when I was just five.

Unsurprisingly, I completely forgot about it until I was a lot older, but eventually it dawned on me that I had been watching a momentous occasion in the history of my world; a world that would never be the same again.

It is entirely possible that without the breakthrough work of rocketeer Wernher Von Braun – working for Nazi Germany in World War Two and then America afterwards – man might never have set foot on the surface of the moon; something that I would be captivated by

when reading about it years later.

The second episode which engaged me with history was my own school project on the subject of another physicist and engineer, Galileo Galilei.

This time I was a decade older and it was possibly the first piece of proper journalism that I did, researching my subject, forming my own view of him and then writing it all down for someone else to read and evaluate.

It was also the longest piece of writing I had ever done and I completely immersed myself in it. I still have the script today, and memories of schoolboy writer’s cramp!

By actively engaging with both stories, from what was then the present day for the first and then centuries ago for the second, I came to understand that history is no more than storytelling, albeit the telling of factual stories.

True, the telling can be embellished, bent or even stretched to breaking point.

But it is storytelling all the same.

And that’s where today, and right now, we are all living witnesses to the story of our world which somebody in the future will frame for someone else as being historic.

Coronavirus will, of course, be the dominant subject of 2020 for historians to pore over, but think of all the other events that have been part of the year so far and are worthy of note ... political intrigue in the United States; global recession and its effects; Britain’s continued steps towards withdrawing from the EU; even an industrialist and car maker sending astronauts to the International Space Station aboard privately funded spacecraft, with plans to then send them to Mars.

Wernher Von Braun (ironically born on March 23) would have been spellbound, as was I when it happened. And I’m now 56.

History might seem like something passed – something in the past.

But when you think about it, the past becomes the past a split second after it has been the present, which is itself fascinating.

We are indeed living in historic times and with a rate of change that surpasses anything that our world has seen before.

That rate of change will increase still further, so buckle up for the ride.

It won’t be boring, Sophie.