Message in a bottle
Today, we have a special guest blog written by Andrew Smith, a relative of programme manager, Janice Ratter and a teacher at the University of Chichester. Andrew writes more generally on resistance, protest and identity in modern France. He is a Scottish emigre in London where he lives with his wife Holly and their daughter Penny, pictured here.
‘The post comes in like a message in a bottle. Today, we were delighted to receive a box of vegetables in one delivery, and in another, some activity books for my daughter, Penny and a long-awaited copy (for me, at least) of Alain Peyrefitte’s C’Etait De Gaulle (the plus-sized one-volume Gallimard edition from 2002, for anyone that’s keeping score).
‘Michael, our South African postie, continues to do a sterling job, keen for our usual cheery (socially distanced) chat on his rounds. Today, we spoke about the article which I’d ordered that book to support, looking at the commemoration of D-Day in the 1950s. I’d ordered the book a few weeks ago from a second-hand bookshop in France, which must have been just before they went into lockdown. We in the UK followed their lead a fortnight later, and the duration of that book’s journey across borders tracked changing realities across Europe and the wider world. Don’t worry, I gave it a wipe down after it arrived.
‘The rhythms and realities of continuing to ‘do history’ under the lockdown are starting to make a bit more sense to me. For our part, we’re a small family (two adults, one toddler) living in suburban London. We’re all working remotely, my wife helping track the changing realities of employment law, while I pivot to online teaching (and maybe some writing at some point, perhaps?), and my daughter adapts to this odd new world.
‘Today, we all had online meetings. My wife and I spoke to colleagues (as well as students for me), while my daughter had online sessions with her nursery school. If you’ve ever thought that faculty meetings are interesting ethnographic experiences, then seeing a gaggle of three-year-olds use online meeting software is a real hoot!
‘Flexibility and realism seem key to our continuing sanity in this difficult moment, as well as acknowledging where following routines can both help and hinder. I’m still chatting with the postie, but there’s definitely a new anticipation about it (for me), and he does now have to leave the post on the doorstep. We’ve got a wee schedule for my daughter as well, to try and bring some variety to her day. My own teaching now takes an ever-increasing time to deliver, and online meeting requests seem to spring up like mushrooms after the rain.
‘Perhaps these new constraints will create some new leap forward in my life and work. Perhaps not. In the last section of Peyrefitte’s bumper book, he quotes the elderly De Gaulle saying ‘for me, the horizon is at hand’. For our wee family, our horizons stretch about as far as the front door for the moment. And yet, from a screen, I’ve spoken to friends in the US, Europe, the Middle East and beyond. And the postie, of course.
‘If studying history has taught me anything, it’s that the horizon is a movable feast. Our horizon is what we make it, marked by the daily rhythms of our lives and our aspirant dreams. Rhythms may change when life is demarcated by the doorstep, but dreams remain unbound. If the post, like messages in a bottle, can conjure up new worlds then I can certainly share my screen with a toddler and explore the new possibilities therein.’
