"Visit a vibrant and vivid past with two fabulous guides, one from the 18th century, and the other his seven-times-great great-grandson from today."
Thought-provoking, amusing, and moving, this heartfelt walk into the past beckons with intimacy and bursts with familiarity into our world today. Author Ian Marchant discovers a long forgotten relative Thomas Marchant and meets, greets, and grows to love him while reading his diary written between 1714-1728. This book called to me from the synopsis, it promises a profound viewing of a past life, to a time before industrialisation while connecting via a unique bond to the present, and it more than delivers. Ian Marchant writes with an expressive pen while detailing his ancestor, his way of life, and the Sussex countryside. On finding his relative was a Diarist he says: “And so I am in the extraordinary position of knowing what my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Thomas Marchant was doing on pretty much any given days 300 years ago”. We first meet Thom on the 16 March 1720 where he proclaims a wet day while the carthorses were shoed and he taught someone how to make an ox harness. On the same day in 2020, Ian’s own diary details the arrival of Coronavirus. While walking beside Thom he questions, comments, and compares our cycle of life and the mistakes we make, while also celebrating the joy of family and the natural world around us. One Fine Day is the most wonderful invitation to become a part of a conversation between two men born centuries apart, we’ve chosen it as a LoveReading Star Book and it comes with our hand-on-heart recommendation.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
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A time-travelling, genealogical adventure, bringing pre-industrial, rural, eighteenth-century England vividly to life on the page.
One day Ian Marchant, acclaimed author of books on music, railways and pubs, decided, as all men of a certain age must, to have a dig around his family history. Surprisingly quickly, a web search informed him that his seven-times-great great-grandfather, Thomas Marchant had left a detailed diary from 1714 to 1728. So far, so jolly ...
Life-loving diarist Thom - who liked a drink and a game of cards - feels recognisably Marchant to Ian. With fascinating, immersive detail we learn about Thom's family farm and fishponds; about dung, horses and mud; about beer, the wife's nights out, his own job troubles and their shared worries for their children. But as Ian digs deeper beyond the Sussex diary's bucolic portrait he discovers a subtext - a family descended from immigrants, with anti-establishment politics, who are struggling with illness, political instability and cash crises - just as their country does three centuries on.
'When I was reflecting late one January evening on the differences between Thom and me, I realised the unbridgeable thing that comes between us is industrialisation. He lived right at its beginning, while I am living somewhere towards its end. Old Thom Marchant was one of the last people before industrialisation to understand how his world worked - and how to be largely self-sufficient in it. He knew where his food came from, his fuel, his water, his clothes. He knew how the welfare system worked, and was part of its administration; he knew who looked after the roads, too. He collected taxes. He was not separate from the system, but part of it.'
Rich with immersive detail, One Fine Day draws a living portrait of Marchant family life in the 1720s and how their England (rainy, muddy, politically turbulent, illness-ridden) became the England of the 2020s.
One Fine Day features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, History, Diaries, letters and journals, Travel writing, European history, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Memoirs, History and Archaeology, Travel, Lifestyle, Hobbies and Leisure, Non-Fiction Books of the Month, Recommendations, Star Books
One Fine Day is available in Paperback, Hardback, Ebook
One Fine Day was written by Ian Marchant and published by September Publishing
One Fine Day has 352 pages
£11.69
