FEISTY WOMEN IN HISTORY by Theresa Breslin

 

Why is it that highly intelligent, accomplished, able women are viewed with suspicion by men (and other women) and get such a bad press?

ISABELLA of Spain – researched when writing Prisoner of the Inquisition

Isabella conquering Granada

Brought up by mentally disturbed mother. Prominent supporters of her family’s rightful claim to the throne of Castile switched sides (sometimes several times) Brother died. She had to take control. Marriage brokered with Ferdinand of Aragon who thought he’d then be King of Castile and Aragon and take control of both - but Isabella wouldn’t let him and had herself crowned Queen of Castile.

Turned the government from one of venal corruption unto one that allowed the people to prosper and live under a rule of law Was clever and had the foresight to back Columbus when others turned him down

OK -  so people who disagreed with her views tended to be deal with in very disagreeable manner, but that was the custom of the time, and if she hadn’t, well…..   

CATHERINE de’ MEDICI, Queen of France – researched when writing The Nostradamus Prophecy

Catherine de' Medici consulting her Magic Mirror

“Sold” as a bride to the son of the King of France and fell in love with him but was humiliated for many years by him openly consorting with his mistress and showering honours upon her when he became King. Was about to put aside as barren when suddenly had lots of children - rumour was that his mistress had to insist that he slept with his wife to produce an heir and safeguard the throne.  How awful was that for poor Catherine?  However her time came. King dies. Catherine at once takes back the beautiful Chateau the King had given his mistress and the jewels etc, etc. Beset on all side by ruthless men with her children too small to rule, she fought her whole life to keep the throne safe for them to inherit. Was said to have started the (Note: very successful and lucrative) French perfume industry… in addition to perfume wa 

s supposed to have imported the art of making poison too…

But if the armed guard supposed to be protecting you and yours is in the pay of your worst enemy what’s a girl supposed to do? 

CATERINA Sforza & LUCREZIA Borgia - researched when writing The Medici Seal

CATERINA Sforza

Husband murdered and left to defend her city and people against greedy would be conquerors. Is captured with her children and negotiates a deal whereby she is released to go into the last of her fortresses holding out against the enemy to persuade them to surrender. When she gets there she encourages her Captain and his soldiers not to give up, stands on the battlements and shouts down at her enemies, telling them all the tortures and deaths she will inflict upon them. They threaten to kill her children. The Bold Caterina’s response is to hoik up her skirts, point to her private parts and say “ Do you worst. I have the means to make more!”

Obviously Caterina was astute enough to work out that as soon as her enemies took her last fortress they would murder her and her children so she cunningly secured her freedom so that she could lead her armed men who were inspired by her courage and thus gave her children their best chance of survival. They all did.

That amount of nerve leaves you gasping but, hey, way to go, Caterina!

Film Poster for Lucrezia Borgia

Lucrezia Borgia. 

Famous (infamous?) Born daughter of a man who became Pope she had riches in plenty but very little control over her life as her father and her ruthless brother used her as a pawn in the strategies to acquire power and money. Husband she loved was murdered by her brother, Cesare, when he was no longer useful for his ambitions. Sent to marry the Duke of Ferrara who didn’t really care for her but she won his respect by her courage in defending her adopted city against their enemies and her diplomatic skill. When he was away he left the government in her hands. In addition to being a wise leader she also encouraged the Arts, especially poetry

… possibly personally very encouraging to one poet in particular, but a girl has to have a diversion or two when all that war business is going on.

These were game gals – what’s not to admire about them?

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LATEST BOOKS

Spy for the Queen of Scots  

The Traveller  (from dyslexia friendly publisher Barrington Stoke)

Divided City   Playscript now available.

Inspired - Celia Rees

I recently found myself in Salisbury, on my way to somewhere else, and I took the opportunity to go and look at the cathedral. It is one of my favourite cathedrals. I love the purity of the Early English architecture. The cathedral is pleasingly all of a piece. It was built by Bishop Richard Poore and completed quickly in only 38 years from its foundation in 1220 to the completion of the main body of the building in 1258. There  have been relatively few additions since then. Except, of course, for the spire. Salisbury has the tallest spire of any British cathedral and it can be seen from miles around. The spire was a later addition, built between 1313 and 1330. 

Like many churches and cathedrals, the siting of Salisbury had been fixed on by a vision rather than more practical considerations. A decision was made to move the church and bishopric from Old Sarum, several miles to the north and the actual site was decided by a bow shot. The arrow hit a deer which died on the spot where the cathedral was to be built. Unfortunately, the deer died on low, marshy ground with a very high water table. Too high for proper foundations, so the cathedral's foundations are only four feet deep. Not ideal for the building of a 404 ft spire which would add 6,397 tons of extra weight. 

The building of the spire was the subject of William Golding's 1964 novel, The Spire. In Golding's novel the fictional Dean Jocelin is gripped by his own vision to build a great spire, despite the seeming impossibility of building such a tall structure on such shallow foundations. The book is one of the reasons that the cathedral has become a special place for me. I first discovered the novel when I was a young teacher, in my second year. The Deputy Head of Department went on sabbatical and I took over his 'A' level teaching. One of his texts was The Spire. I had not read it before and it is not any easy read. It is not a book which gives up its meaning easily. The reader has to work at it. I found Golding's dense, elliptical, metaphorical style intensely rewarding and was fascinated by the pagan elements within the book. Salisbury is set within an ancient landscape and I liked the idea that there could be of a surviving belief system underlying and untouched by Dean Jocelin's Christianity. This is a novel about belief, faith, vision and doubt and does far more than other novels set in this period, and dealing with much the same thing, to describe and define the medieval mind - and in far fewer pages.

One of the most difficult challenges facing any novelist is to get into the minds of those who lived in the past. Golding manages to do just that. If you haven't read The Spire, I urge you to do so. I will certainly be reading it again.

Parks and Gardens by Penny Dolan

Most visitor trips to Harrogate will almost certainly pass The Stray - an open stretch of grass that borders the town centre – and then drop down Montpelier Hill to the “famous” Valley Gardens, our local park.

With a streamside walk, ice-cream parlour and ever-changing floral display, the Valley Gardens give a prosperous, comfortable air of the visitor side of town, where the day trippers mingle with conference delegates and others queuing outside Betty’s tea-rooms.

Public parks are such an ordinary, accepted part of our urban lives and so at the mercy of the British weather that we barely notice them. 

Parks are stages: they only appear in the media as places where an event is to happen, has happened, or a crime has taken place. Rarely in their own right.

While parks can house concerts and celebrations of all sorts, in general our public parks and squares are low-key places. Push-chairs are pushed in them. Kids play in them. Joggers jog in them. Friends have casual picnics in them. Teens skulk and prowl in them and lovers meet their loves.

Parks come in a variety of styles. Some are windswept, muddy grounds, like the “Rec” of my childhood on Wood Green’s Noel Park Estate. Others, like leafy Wanstead Woods, still have a pleasant wildness about them. However, thanks to Lottery funding and a keener eye on the “health and safety” of the equipment, some parks seem to look better than they have done before. There is more and safer play equipment, more defined sports spaces and more awareness of what people need from parks.

Yet that renewal will depend on where you live. Parks are run by local councils, for the greater good of the people and if ever there’s a principle that’s getting twisted out of shape by austerity Britain, it’s “greater good”.  Anxiety about that, and about how and why public parks came about set me searching.

For a park, the Valley Gardens has a curious history. Way back in the 18th & 19th centuries, money was to be made in the upstart spa of Harrogate by offering health treatments, particularly taking the waters, one of which is very potent brew.  The visitors were encouraged to promenade between draughts of the stuff, which gave them a chance to mingle and meet.

However, in my personal view, the original liquid with its sulphuric tang - most unlike the currently marketed bottled “Harrogate Water” - probably had such a strong effect that the consumers needed a polite space to cope with the gastric turbulence.  It was probably a bit too dangerous to wander discreetly on The Stray which the young bucks had already grabbed for random horse racing. 

Harrogate grew. With the 1841 Harrogate Improvement Act, local businessmen began promoting the town and its now-enclosed wells as a resort.  Hotels and theatres were built, the railway arrived, the Royal Baths Hospital was established and royal relations - just over the way in Harewood House – added glamour and gentility. No wonder the idea of the Valley Gardens covering the less sweetly named Bogs Field was a winner.

Both town and gardens rose to prominence in the early twentieth century. Set just below the Hospital, the Valley Gardens was used by invalids and convalescent officers sent home from the Great War to regain their health.

Health, in general, was one reason for the growth in public parks. When, in the mid eighteen hundreds, people flooded in from the countryside to the Victorian mills and factories. The polluted air and poor living conditions made some of those in authority worry about the health and the morals of the workforce.

Open air began to matter, and the idea of parks - once the private preserve of the wealthy - were seen as a way of raising the standards of the population. Urban planning encouraged this. There was legislation: the 1875 Public Health Act, the 1881 Open Spaces Act and the 1884 Burial Grounds Act, all encouraging improvements in land use within towns and cities for the good of the urban population. 

The Temperance movement were great enthusiasts. The great Titus Salt’s model village at Saltaire has a park among its public amenities, but no public house. 

Civic dignitaries and social reformers saw parks as a way of reforming of the population, of turning the people away from gross pursuits and providing them with healthy leisure activities. Parks would increase physical, intellectual and moral standards among the population. 

Many parks were funded by public subscription, especially those commemorating Queen Victoria’s 1887 Golden and 1889 Diamond Jubilees. Parks often kept the name of their main benefactor, reminding everyone of the importance of philanthropy. 

However, parks were intended as places for all. They offered space for strolling or games, and inspirational beauty in the form of fountains and lakes and “landscape”. They added a kind of cultural education through classical and commemorative statuary, entertainment through bandstands, and horticulture knowledge through their plant displays and botanical glasshouses. At a grander civic level, parks were the settings for galas, pageants, all levels of pomp, ceremony and fireworks and even opportunities for art displays and exhibitions. Do you remember the host of painted elephants around London’s parks a few years ago? Of course, parks and squares were hedged with Rules and Regulations to ensure correct behaviour.

Needless to say, the donating of parkland was not entirely an altruistic gesture. The grand houses had become more difficult to maintain, especiallywith property taxes. Some family estates that were built in the countryside had now been encircled by city streets. Donating an unwanted property had advantages, especially when the public park had your name attached.

So now, as spaces, parks come tangled with other issues. They carry so many shades of class and privilege and gentrification and middle-class entertainment that it’s easy to dismiss the benefits they bring. Yet, if ever there's a sunny summer day, the city parks fill up with people of all sorts enjoying themselves, especially those with no garden for themselves. Then parks show themselves as  good things.

But could these same parks - so much part of our history - slip away, be rationalised? Like the libraries, where only one per city is seen as necessary? When the poor can always take the bus?  And will the parks be maintained, still? The angry-eyed park- keeper – that icon of comics – may have become a set of CCTV cameras, but good parks still need the care-givers, the gardeners, the cleaners, the grounds-people to keep them pleasant places. How is that to be managed? Or won’t it? A volunteer system can be a great resource but, in my opinion,  only works as a long-term systemwhen strengthened by a solid core of continuing professional expertise.  

Or will our public spaces be taken over, entirely sponsored, enclosed? Will the “greater good” legacy lost? Are urban planners and architects truly required to take good public space into account?   

One can have wonderful initiatives, of course, but will the Royal Wild Flower meadows be enough? How much open space will be left in the Olympic Park a few years on?

There’s another aspect, too. A park is a place for conversation, for people to meet, to gather together, freely and for free. Surely that’s valuable too? Or does the human voice not need to be heard? Already when spaces become corporate, emptying when business is done, the life of that area disappears.

Right now, in Istanbul, a conflict rages. It was sparked, I read, by plans to build a shopping mall over the one remaining public park, although other problems are obviously involved. 

But that aspect of the Turkish protest did set me wondering about our own urban parks - the ones that aren’t the renowned parks of London. 

Do parks matter, still? Or could we lose that heritage by casual indifference and neglect?

And, maybe more happily, how's your own favourite park?

Penny Dolan.

Author of A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E. (Bloomsbury)

www.pennydolan.com

Escape from the trenches: by Sue Purkiss

One rainy autumn night in 1915, a chaplain named Philip Clayton arrived at the badly shelled station of a little town in Belgium named Poperinge. He had just been appointed to a battalion named The Buffs and Bedfords, whose turn it was to have a rest in Pop away from the front line. Clayton, bespectacled, thirty years old, short, blessed with an irrepressibly optimistic nature, and always known as Tubby, decided to leave his luggage at the station, stroll into town and find himself a hotel. It was 2am, and an inky black night. After half an hour, with no town in sight, Tubby began to have doubts. He enquired of two men in front of him - and discovered that he was actually heading away from Pop, and towards Ypres: the once-beautiful mediaeval town which now lay in ruins, as did the fiercely fought-over countryside around it.

The ruins of Ypres

Nothing daunted, Tubby turned round and walked back again. When he reached Pop, he looked round with interest. It was a small place, with a large central square from which radiated a warren of narrow streets. It was just within range of the big guns, so it had suffered some shell damage, but relative to the desolation of the Ypres Salient a few miles away, it was a haven of safety and it was the place where soldiers came for a break from the front line. There weren't enough billets for them all in the town, so most of them had to sleep in a tented camp, but there were cafes to visit and the 'Fancies' to go and see. This was a show ornamented by two Belgian ladies charmingly known as Lanoline and Vaseline, who, according to Tubby, 'could neither sing nor dance, but at least added a touch of femininity'!

Talbot House from the garden

Tubby saw a gap. The soldiers needed a place where they could escape from the war for a few hours; a place 'to provide happiness for the men', which would also have a chapel. Together with the senior chaplain, Neville Talbot, he set about finding a suitable building, and chose a large house in the Rue de l'Hopital which had suffered some shell damage and whose owner, a wealthy brewer, agreed to let for a low rent provided the army would repair it.

This was done, and Tubby soon had the place looking cosy. He had a chapel created in the loft, accessible only by a reasonably sturdy ladder. Below were bedrooms, a library, a billiard room, a writing room, a games room, and in the basement, a place for concerts and entertainments. It was called Talbot House after the senior chaplain's brother, who had been killed not long before and was buried in the ironically named Sanctuary Wood.

The chapel

The house was open to all ranks. It must have been one of the very few places where you could see a general, a captain, a second lieutenant and a private having a cup of tea and a chat. Tubby had interesting priorities. His motto was, 'Give me the luxuries of life, and I care not who has the necessities.' So a piano was far more important than dish cloths, and they acquired one very early on. There were whist drives, debates, classes, chess tournaments - and there was the chapel, which on Sundays was filled with so many men that the floor swayed. It became known as Toc H, which was the signal terminology for Talbot House: the movement of that name developed from these beginnings after the war.

You can still go to see Talbot House, as I did recently - you can even stay there in one of those small simple rooms that gave so many exhausted soldiers a respite from hell during the war. The personality of Tubby pervades the place: there's a warmth and a humour and a complete lack of any whiff of officialdom or stuffiness - witness the signs that say things like No swearing aloud hear, or: If you are in the habit of spitting on the carpet at home, please spit here.

When you go to Flanders and visit the battlefields and the museums, there are not many of the things you see that give a lift to the heart, but Talbot House stands out as one.

On the other side of Poperinge, there is a sight which is quite the reverse. Dominating the town square is a rather elegant cream building, the Hotel de Ville, or town hall. Inside is a cell. In a quiet interior courtyard, there stands a post. It is an execution post, and seventeen men, who had spent their last night in that cell, were shot here: fifteen British and two Canadian soldiers. Behind the post a poem by Erwin Mortier is inscribed, containing these lines:

Do not aim at me lads.
Aim at the white cloth

On my chest.

3080 soldiers were sentenced to death in the First World War, though 'only' 346 executions were carried out. 77% of these were sentenced for desertion. Michael Morpurgo marvellously tells the story of one such in Private Peaceful.

So much needless carnage: so many millions of wasted lives. There are 87 cemeteries of war dead in the Ypres area alone. 346 is a tiny number by comparison, but it seems such a bitter thing that with all that slaughter going on, men whose only crime was to crack under unbearable strain were shot by their own side.

So I'm glad that the spirit of the remarkable Tubby Clayton is still alive in Poperinge. It's a beacon: a reminder that amid all the horror, there was - and is - hope, too, and kindness.

Tubby Clayton, at Talbot House

Lovey Warne of the New Forest

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I mentioned last month some of the ways in which women took part in the smuggling trade. Today, I'd like to say a few words about a particular female smuggler; Lovey Warne.

The Warnes were a New Forest family heavily engaged in the trade. The two brothers John and Peter ran goods in from the coast and their sister Lovey assisted them.

She was a human signal, said to have walked on Verely Hill whenever the revenue men were abroad and a run was taking place. The sight of her in her cloak effectively warned the landers to be cautious. I'm not entirely sure how this worked as normally landers brought goods inland on moonless nights, but that is how the story goes. I borrowed the trick for my own character, Isabelle, who walks along the clifftop at Kimmeridge in a red cloak to give the incoming ship the all clear. In fact the red cloak has even made it on to the book's jacket:

 

Lovey also wrapped lace around herself beneath her clothes and boldly walked off the smuggling ship and home with the lace to evade the revenue officers - who, as I've mentioned before, weren't allowed to rummage women. Apparently this career came to an abrupt end when she was invited for a drink in the inn by a revenue officer. She dared not refuse and he took liberties with her; his hand stealing to her waist and thigh to check for lace. She only escaped his attentions by jabbing him in the eye with her elbow and fleeing while the landlady sat on him under pretence of tending his eye.

These incidents, too, I have borrowed for Isabelle. They were just too delightful to pass over.

Bad Words, Bad Deeds Catherine Johnson

This is a post about a couple of very useful books.  Two Slang Dictionaries and a linguistic study that was first published in the USA in 1940. I'll begin with the bad words without which I could never have written any historical novels.....

I love my slang dictionaries. I ave two, a big fat yellow one Slang, by Jonathon Green, which is incredibly useful. I don't mean to come the raw prawn,  (1960s Aus) so I'll be polite but since this is a short blog so I'm sure I won't box the compass (1700s UK)  but honestly, don't  you love slang? Of course it's mostly money or sex, which I'll avoid here, but take a look at this;

Rhino, Gingerbread, Scramble, Flag, Rainbow, Spanks, Stumpy, Teaspoons, Muck, Garbage, Goree,

Moss, Old Mr Gory, Grannam, Ribbin, Prey, Bull, Quidds

And I bet there are a million more terms for money. New ones we don't even know yet.

And actually I'm sure you've all got this book at home, the one downside is that you do have to know the word you're looking up beforehand, so unless you can leisurely trawl though it's very interesting pages, it can be tricky....which is why I would like to recommend to you this books younger, nimbler, slimmer cousin. It's by Jonathon Green and it's called Slang Down the Ages. The words are handily arranged in topics,The Body, Men, Women, Excellence, Intelligence, Fools, The Lavatory, etc. And further categorised by date. So, what a specific oath, say a euphemism for hell from the 19th century say? Go to Putney on a pig is good. Rhyming slang for bread? Needle and thread. You get the idea.

So my other book is a real treat if you've never read it. The Big Con was written by a Professor of Linguistics  and is the result of years of study, of interviews with grifters and con men in the 'Golden Age' of confidence trickery, late 19th and early 20th century America. It's the book that gave us The Sting and from which the TV show Hustle took it's plots. I came across it writing Nest of Vipers, which was about a gang of 18th century tricksters. 

It is a marvellous engaging  read, even if you're not in the least bit interested in criminology or cons. Just the language - they have their own spiel, impenetrable to outsiders, so if you're a square paper, you won't get roped by a soap game or a subway dealer and if a man gives you the tish, you'll make sure he gets sneezed.

The names too, Yellow Kid Weil, Cockroach Gary, The Postal Kid, The Major, The Brass Kid. 

Enjoy.

Oh and what's your favourite historical slang word? Rantipole? Tattermedallion? Hawkshaw?

 

The first gamers: and the end of history - by Manda Scott

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World of Warcraft: the biggest MMORPG in the world

I have a confession to make: I play World of Warcraft.   I have a battleground healer who has in her time, been an undead shadow priest called Kyst, and a night-elf discipline priest called Warfaryn. I have a shaman called Saffyk and when nobody in the player world got it, I created a healer monk called Sapphic. They still don’t get it.  But that’s not the point.  The point is in the community and the competition. 

Arathi Basin battleground

I play, I discover, at what is generally termed semi-hard-core levels, which is to say I give it fair amounts of time (10pm – midnight most nights) but I don’t compete at the super-high levels. I am, though, in a rated battle ground team and the work required to stay there is significant: I have to keep my gear up to scratch which means doing a lot of sub-optimal fighting, but when it’s right, and the team is working well, there’s nothing like it.

Actually, there are a few things like it: climbing was one – that sense of absolute partnership with whoever’s holding the rope and who does, quite literally, hold your life in their hands: if you climb regularly together, you develop the kinds of intense relationships that tend otherwise only to happen in high pressure jobs like surgery or theatrical acting, where people take risks together on a daily (or nightly) basis.   Battle re-enactment had a similar effect: the team work, the practice it took to reach a good standard, that sense of all the pieces coming together when we won a particularly hard battle: and yes, the sense of being able to defend someone’s ‘life’ and of having them defend me.

Scoreboard: a vital part of gaming feedback

Game designers define these bonding experiences as some of the most intense in human emotional evolution.  They have words for the pride we feel when our side wins (Fiero), or the almost equally powerful pride we feel when someone we have coached and helped also wins (Naches).  They name the sense of everything coming together as ‘flow’ and they list the four components of gaming that make it so addictive: games have an attainable goal (that often pushes us to the edges of our competence, where we are most in flow), games have clear, succinct rules, games have voluntary participation, games have a feedback system.

Arena competition 2vs2

By combining all of these, a game – defined as any voluntary activity involving the solving of unnecessary obstacles – has the potential to provide us with massive positive emotion, as opposed to the outside world which often provides less than obvious goals – certainly not goals that are theoretically attainable and for which we are given clear, regularly irregular, obvious feedback.  In short, we have the chance to excel in a social context that matters to us: when I heal the flag carrier in Warsong Gulch and my team caps, there is a moment’s peak experience that is the same whether I have ‘died’ or survived (and in any case, I’ll resurrect fairly soon, so dying is not too much of a problem, it just removes me from the game for a bit, thus depriving me of my chance to throw game changing heals).

The evolution of games is one of the most interesting historical stories – this is, after all, an historical blog, so this is the history:   It is widely held that the Lydians were the first to engage in serious gaming as a culture.  Herodotus tells us that in the reign of king Atys, there was such a famine as the Lydian people were in danger of starvation.  So he set up a law, by which the entire population would eat one day and on the next day, they would play games that were so immersive, they wouldn’t notice they weren’t eating, They played dice, knucklebones, ball games and ‘in this way,’ Herodotus said, ‘they invented all the games that are common.’ 

They passed the time this way for eighteen years and at the end of it, when the famine still gripped the land, they played one last, ‘epic’ game, in which the ‘winners’ – half the population – took to boats and sailed off to find a land free of famine, while the remaining half stayed behind and had enough food to sustain them.  Current archaeological theory, backed by DNA evidence, suggests that the Lydians were the fore-runners to the Etruscans who were in turn, the biological ancestors of those who founded Rome: and went on to make the public slow death of other people the most gripping set of games their culture could imagine. 

All of which leads us to examine games rather hard, because the current generation of children is the first to grow up with immediate access to all that digital games can offer.

I was very struck reading an original Grimm Brothers fairy tale recently, which described the young princess ‘amusing herself by playing with a golden ball: she threw it up and caught it and in this way kept herself happy for days on end’. Until the ball fell into the well and was found by a frog and we slide into psychosexual allusion rather fast.

But I am trying to imagine any of the children of my acquaintance finding amusement in throwing a ball of any colour at all into the air for hours on end and catching it, when they could be playing Warcraft. Or Halo4. Or Angry Birds. Or on-line Scrabble. Or Chore Wars (yes, you can turn your household chores into a game. It works.  Details here: http://www.chorewars.com/)

Modern kids spend roughly 20 hours per week at school – and another 24 hours per week playing games.  That will rise as games available on mobile phones become more immersive and more multi-player.   So the children of today know that ‘work’ can be fun, can provide flow, can provide tangible evidence of success and social bonding. Or it can be dull, repetitive, with high stress levels and no obviously attainable goals.

Our educators are only lately catching onto this. I have read of one school in the US where the entire school experience is structured as a game: a pupil might discover a ‘secret code’ hidden in the library which takes quite advanced mathematical skills to solve, and she’ll get extra points if she solves it ahead of her team mates (aka class mates). She might have to bring in two or three of them to help, because some have higher maths-scores than she does, but they will discover ‘fiero’ and ‘naches’ in the success of the ‘secrete mission’ and in the helping of others.  At other times in the day, our hypothetical student will spend time teaching a computer how to do some more basic maths – because teaching others is the best way to learn, at other times, she’ll be powering up her language skills in order to help others find their way out of a labyrinth.  She’ll come home full of self-created projects she wants to get done before the next day and, because the whole of school is one big, epic game, she won’t need or want to spend time on Warcraft or Halo or Call of Duty.

So: history is useful when it teaches us how we can be, if it shows us mistakes we can avoid (we never do, but that’s a different post), if it helps us to understand ourselves.  But we are on the brink of the singularity and games are becoming an increasing part of the world we inhabit.  We as writers and readers are the last generation who will have grown in a world where we created our own games.  We, as readers and writers, need to understand the realities of the world that is evolving, and step into it.

One way to do that is to create games of the world around us: Chore Wars is one.  SuperBetter is another (https://www.superbetter.com/)  which helps people recover from acute or chronic illness.

We can work out how to survive without oil (http://worldwithoutoil.org/metaabout.htm), or we can generate our own games based around, perhaps, discovering the folding of proteins that may one day help biologists to understand the causes of cancer.  (http://www.gamesforchange.org/play/foldit/)

The possibilities are without end and probably beyond our current imagination. Which is why we are at the threshold of ‘beyond history’ .  Never, not even in ancient Lydia, have we had an entire generation that understood games as a way of life.  How that will shape our future is also beyond our imagining.  But very probably not beyond theirs.