One Fine Day (e-book) (used book) | Ian Marchant | bookbook.eu

Description

After discovering his great (x7) grandfather wrote a diary of his daily life, Ian Marchant takes a journey back to the mid-eighteenth century to get to know his ancestor and the land and political era he lived in. Family history at it's most immersive, adventurous and moving.

"One fine day in early spring, I took the slow road, and drove across England to visit my long-dead family in Sussex ..."

From one of the great chroniclers of our times and our land - the author of Parallel Lines, A Hero for High Times and The Longest Crawl - comes a career-defining book.

This is the story of Ian Marchant's great (x7) grandfather, Thomas Marchant, who left a detailed diary from 1714 to 1728. Life-loving Thomas - who liked a drink and game of cards - feels recognisably Marchant to Ian. Thomas wrote about his family farm and fishponds; about dung, horses and mud, and about the making and drinking of cider. But, as Ian discovers, he was also a Fifteener, a Jacobite sympathiser determined to bring down the monarchy.

Three hundred years later his 7 x grandson tells the story of uncovering a new relative, and digs deep into the daily life and political concerns of the 1720s. By exploring the Marchant family's journey - and how their England (rainy, muddy, politically turbulent and illness ridden) became the England of 2021, Ian Marchant discovers just how much we have to learn from our ancestors.

By turns funny, lyrical, moving and illuminating, this is a conversation with the dead to find what is still alive. A conversation between a world that stood on the brink of industrialisation and a world that is now exhausted by it.