“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.” ( Henry Ford Chicago Tribune, 1916).

In our creative writing class, the homework for this week is to write a piece of historical fiction, set in the 1940’s. My heart sank. I dislike historical fiction. I really am not interested in how Henry VIII lived. Nor in his relationship with Cardinal Wolsey et al. ( I say this with no sense of pride. More a confession.) My wife and some   of her friends recently went to the see an exhibition at the British museum about Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria. i wondered if I was going to go along. It took me two minutes to decide. I wasn’t going. I know the pattern by now. My wife and her friends will spend 20 minutes drooling over an Illuminated Manuscript. In the meantime, I will have been round the entire exhibition and already be through my first coffee before they move on. By the time they join me, I will have read “War and Peace” three times. In the original Russian.

I had a similar experience recently. The Ashmolean museum at Oxford ran an exhibition on Witchcraft which sounded interesting. I saw it and was disappointed. It took me a while to work out why. It was the lack of joined up thinking. There were a collection of alleged withes spells, of doors with protective runes on them, and of some of the prisons in which alleged witches were kept. (It really did not pay to be a slightly eccentric widow in England during the 1800’s.) These artefacts were interesting as far as they went. But i was left wanting something more. Eventually i worked out that I wanted some links made. What did the runes mean? What lay behind alleged spells? What was the thinking behind the artefacts? And, more, what were our contemporary spells, runes and charms? Who tries today’s witches and warlocks?   (Myra Hindley fits the bill as a contemporary witch. Along with the two boys who killed Jamie Bolger as warlocks-in-chief.They represent all the drives in us that we most fear and thus label “evil”.) Sadly the exhibition didn’t make any of these connections.

As a psychodynamic counsellor, I spend a lot of my time hearing histories. It’s one of the first things i ask a new patient “Tell me about yourself.” I hear their history and spend a lot of time going over it, adding to it as more information is shared. Building a picture of the things that shaped my patient. And still shape them. An idea summarised by Michael Jacobs in his book “The Presenting Past” and put poetically by T.S.Eliot   in his Four Quartets

“Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past”

Psychoanalysis summed up in a handful of words! (The Standard Edition of Freud’s work runs to twenty-four volumes.)

So, why am I not interested in history? Perhaps it’s because History is so often presented something with a capital H. It’s Important- with a capital I ! Like an unpleasant tasting medicine, it’s good for me. Well , maybe. But it needs to be relevant. It needs to tell me something about how I live today. Or should live. Telling me about the Spanish Armada doesn’t help me think about the patient in front of me.   I had the same difficulty when doing Geometry at school. I dutifully learned Pythagorus’s theory and its proof. But when presented with a maths problem that needed me to apply it, I was lost. I couldn’t see any connection between the square on the hypotenuse and any other part of the triangle. Or any other aspect of my daily life.