IN THE MAGAZINE

COGITATIONS UPON THE NATURE OF HISTORY

They say that history is written by the winners.
One day the feral scum of Britain will win and roam the country free.
My problem is that they can’t read or write.
And that’ll be the end of history.

Here is basically everything I can remember from history:

1. Louis-Philippe was a pear-shaped king.

2. Some Vietnamese Communists on a big march boiled their belts and ate them.

3. People in the Middle Ages would eat nettle soup.

4. Guy Fawkes had his fingernails pulled out and when he signed his confession his handwriting was bad.

5. William the Conqueror’s body burst because it got all hot and over-inflated in the sun.

6. Christopher Wren built St Paul’s Cathedral.

7. British Tommies would eat bacon in the trenches.

8. There’s a lady in the Imperial War Museum who looks like a barbecued log because she got blown up by a nuclear bomb in Hiroshima.

9. A lady in Hampstead drank some water and proved that poo killed people.

They say that only by knowledge of the past can we prepare for the future and I have no idea how to prepare for the future.

But let’s imagine that the chavs don’t win. Let’s imagine that pens still exist in the future and that history books will still be written. It’s what will be written about that worries me. I know history books. I know how they work. Whole ages and eons are condensed into paragraphs. An entire era is summed up in a soundbite. Things like:

“In their leisure time, the Victorians would like going to the pier and then walking along the promenade.”

The lives of millions of people condensed into a paragraph. I imagine there were loads of Victorians who fucking hated going to the beach. But do they get a look in? No. Where are the miserable people who hated their own age when it comes to history?

My biggest fear is that historians will look back on Britain here and now and describe Pop Idol as our culture, and won’t take into account that there were thousands of people sitting in living rooms, all across the country, fucking hating it. When we die we’re going to be described as a people who were fame-obsessed. We will be regarded as the generation who venerated Kelly Osbourne and Paris Hilton.

I didn’t. And at this rate, the unspoken history of people who hated society will never be told.

LEE KERN

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Comments

Anonymous, on Oct 20, 2008 wrote: years from now, no one will know the truth.