Tomorrow, Today - The Domestic Revolution with Ruth Goodman

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

In this episode, we're joined by none other than Ruth Goodman, best known for her work on the Farms series with BBC (Wartime Farms, Tutor Farms, Victorian Farms) as well as the BBC Victorian Pharmacy miniseries. She's also the author of a number of books on Victorian era women and is a free lance historian working with museums, theatre, television and educational establishments. In this episode, we talk about how our day to day routines have a huge cumulative effect on the environment, our shopping habits can sway the world's patterns of trade, and how we organize and run our family life sets the political tone of nations. How have we seen this in domestic work in history, what have we learned from looking at history, and how has covid changed our relationship with domestic work and how we identify in relation to how we exist?

Welcome back to tomorrow today, the podcast where we talk about the future of tomorrow. But today, I'm your host, Nashflin. I'm joined as always by my beloved co-host, Andy of the Port Poles Omnach. Andy, how are you? You know, I'm the only one that ever gets introduced as of the blah, blah, blah. Why can't I just be Andy? You can, okay, sorry. I'm sorry.

And I'm joined as always by Andy, the weird dude in my basement. That's not better. That's not what I wanted to do. Sorry. Andy. Andy, how are you? I'm good now. How good are you?

Very good. Nash of death and friends. Thank you. Thank you. I'm actually really good. Nash of the internet. Of the internet. Yes, I belong to the...

To the Huff Post's like 10 most popular tweets of the week or something like that. Every week, baby, blah. Back to back, Huff Post champs. It's not BuzzFeed, but it's not close. But we're here. We are online. Were you going to say something worse? No, I was going to make a joke, and then I couldn't think of the wrong.

right word about like they're not professional the like the knockoff no like the university of phoenix yes huff post is the university of phoenix of buzzfeed of buzzfeed everyone knows what that means i understand anyone under over 30 knows what that means tomorrow today the podcast that chades just about everything for no reason like why are we drawing the line in the sand here sponsored by the university of phoenix get a degree you fill the animals literally anything doesn't matter please give them their money. Give all of us money, including them. Also us, yes.

Yes, give us money. Anyway, I'm like losing my mind because this week I got to sit down with the very fantastic Ruth Goodman. Do you know who Ruth Goodman is? I know who Ruth is. I've seen her do terrible things on farms, on TV. And by terrible things, I mean things that are,

she's like, this is what people used to do and then like tears apart an animal viscerally and then like... With her teeth. Yeah, and then does cool stuff with it. But, you know, at the moment, you're just like watching this like sweet old lady like just tear shit apart i mean she's not old no she's not she's like middle-aged yeah she's older than us but she's got a very strong maternal

presence i do want to hug actually um it's a bummer that she's in the uk and we're in the u.s anyway to actually introduce her she's a social and domestic historian in the uk you'd recognize her from any of the bbc historic farm series which if you've never seen before you should stop this podcast and go immediately find uh she's also got a few brilliant billion books out there, including how to be a tutor, how to be a Victorian, how to behave badly in Elizabethan England, and the domestic revolution. And you should also read all of those, so stop this podcast and go by those. All of them. All of them. Read them all at the same time. Come back when you're ready. I'm serious. Come back when you're ready. She's incredible. She's an incredible

woman. She's an incredible historian. She came to history and history education in a totally different way, which we talk about. So I guess my question to you, while we're introing this, is when was the last time you turned your own butter? I usually outsource my butter churning if you know what I mean oh god no that's what you mean anyway so no but seriously churning butter turning butter great skill to have great skill

great for the forearms great for the forearms also if you don't want to go the path of owning your own butter churn and using it which I don't know why you would not but you can just you just take heavy cream you put it in a what are those things called a stand mixer and you just go until it looks like butter and then you take the butter out and you

Put it in a butter. Congratulations. It's very, very simple. I don't know why people think it's so hard. I went to Pilgrim Camp and that's how I learned to make butter. But you could just learn it from the internet or from this podcast, actually. Congratulations. You've learned. You've actually, congratulations, you've learned how to make butter. Yeah.

So Ruth is an interesting character for a number of reasons that we've already brought up that she's a unique. She has a unique facet in understanding history, archaeology, living history, which I think is the part that is really important and a lot more complicated than like when we look at these artifacts as these static things and she engages with it through her you know like if you've watched the series this idea of like living the life and having

you know instead of it just being this thing on paper of this is how people lived 400 years ago or whatever it was instead it's how do we actually make this work which I you know it's like trying to rebuild the pyramids Like we can understand on paper how they probably did it, but there's a lot of stuff that's going to be missing that when you get to a point that it's like, oh, how did they actually do this? And I think that's where the magic happens. Right. And not even just how they did it, but how did it feel to live as one of the people that were doing it?

How are their daily lives comprised when they weren't building the pyramids? Yeah. And I don't know why we're focusing on pyramids in this case because she did not have any interest. She's never built a pyramid as far as I know. But I think what's really interesting about her work is that she focuses on like working class people and like specifically the most marginalized people in like working class England that are the women that were, you know, keeping the household going whose histories have been kind of ignored or, you know, seems so fundamentally like average novel or not novel that they've become, you know, not worth studying or just like very like very like topically. studied and understood when obviously it was a lot more complicated and a lot of that agency is brought back through the work she's doing. Right. This is actually, I think one of the first times, if not the first time that you and I have actually sort of done the prep research for this together.

That's not true. Chris Fuchs. Oh, Chris Fuchs. That's just because I was afraid. There's a little bit of fear in there. I am not a science person, so sitting down with science people It was my, what's the big mountain? The Mount Everest. What's the big mountain for 500? The Mount Everest. Clark. My son says, the Mountain Everest.

Yes, because I'm never going up there. No, thanks, Mount Everest. I see you and I don't want to know you. But it's true. I think, you know, we watched the farm series years ago, actually. I'm pretty sure it actually started with you making fun of me for watching the farm series. That also sounds like a tracks. Yeah.

And then you're like, actually, this. This is kind of interesting. Is she making butter? Yeah. And then 36 hours later. But there's something so warm and genuine about the way Ruth approaches history. And this is true. You know, you watch her do these things like the mundane.

Like in most of the farm series, she washes laundry. And for her, there's an enthusiasm and a joy that comes through watching her do something like that. when it in you know in reality you couldn't pay me money to take my clothes down to a river and wash them like you could not there would not be a sum of money no you would be a nudist immediately i would just be like you know what whatever life has been not worth living anyway i'm just laying down i will wear what i'm wearing and then i will die so one of my favorite scenes for ruth like when you say like ruth goodman what do you picture i think of the medieval episode series where she's so excited that you're you she made a stick floor. Yeah. And she's like, look what I did. I made the stick floor and I made a broom and I can sweep it. And it was just like the novelty of simplicity in a way that our history probably wouldn't

otherwise have without that, like being in this 3D moment to experience it and have that experience translate into understanding how people do things is really valuable. And I think especially like in the other work I do around ecology and trying to understand how people have lived historically and like what are the things we can translate to the modern era being able to just go through those experiences to say huh this is a lot more or less work than i thought or i never it never occurred to me like how to how to create some synergies between different practices that need to you would need to do in your day-to-day life and her enthusiasm to do that is really uh infectious i think and i think for me one of the first

moments that I really, well not the first, but one of those moments for me for Ruth was watching her get excited about the Victorian stove that comes in, right? Because Cole sort of changes the Victorian era in its entirety. And when she first moves into the Victorian farmhouse, their stove is actually broken, right? So it gets replaced. And her, and she's excited about it. Exactly. Like her, like, big excitement about the day it gets delivered is like so infectious and genuine. And you can't help. But even if you were like, God, I would never live in the Victorian era, which is a valid, valid thought that you should be having. It's so, like, I would love to be there while she's getting this oven delivered,

just because her excitement is so real and present. And I think in the same series, she's also making ice cream for the first time, and, like, that process also seems really hard. Like, I eat ice cream almost every single day, which I know is gross. But, like, if I had to make it myself, no. Not that way. They didn't have ice. So it was like...

You thought churning butter was hard. Ice butter. Ice butter is harder. Shurning butter in the Arctic. But she's so delighted to do it and go through the practice. And even when it doesn't turn out the way she wants. And I do think that there's an aspect of this in the whole farm series. And not just for her, but also for the other two archaeologists on the show, Peter Ginn and Alex Langlands.

You know, they approach things, you know, very genuinely. And sometimes they fail and things don't go the way they want. But they still enjoy it. and there's still for them a very big learning experience from it, even when it doesn't go on camera the way it should. Yeah, and I think that vulnerability really shines through in the series. And I think also, like, I haven't read much of her written work, but I imagine that her, just from the little bit that I have seen,

that comfortableness with her lack of academic background, I think comes really comfortably through that's like something you can appreciate because it doesn't feel so standoffish, if that makes sense. Yeah, and I think that's a movement that's happening in history in general. You'll find that a lot of more popular histories right now are written not for academic peers, but for people who don't normally participate in a historical discourse. But I do think that when Ruth writes, and this is true of most of her books, if not all of her books,

I don't think that I've read the newest one, but she writes exactly how she talks. and so you can read her book after listening to her talk just on something and be like I can hear you saying this to me which is a true talent actually it's very very difficult to write how you talk and it also makes things feel so much more comfortable much more intimate

in a way that I think history has really really lacked to this point yeah and I think it's also worth pointing out before we wrap this up that there's a difference between like pop history and what we're talking about where pop history is engaging people almost like in a polemical way whereas ruth is engaging like is going through the dirty meandering of history without getting caught up in like these like

gotcha moments of like let's talk about this fun fact like a weird like you know YouTube video that's like three minutes like all the top five dogs and like all you know like that kind of crap like this isn't 10 facts about henry the 8 that will blow your tits clean off like this Or clean on. Or clean on. Depending on where you are. This is very much, this is history, but for people who don't read stuffy academic history.

Like this is history of the people for the people by the people. Wow. Sorry. Should I, are we going marching after this? Like, what's going on? I said I was sorry. I heard it as soon as I said it. But it is true.

You heard that, but you didn't hear churning butter. No, I heard it. I just chose to ignore it. Okay. But I think, you know, our love fest of Ruth is probably due to end now so that she can actually talk. Is there anything else you want to add before we let her have her agency? Yeah, I guess we can do that. If you listen to this and you're a fan of Ruth before, I would also recommend the Port Prolls Almanac had Alex Langlands on.

So I just wanted to plug that really quick. We talk about ecology and landscape restoration. So if you are a big fan of the Tudor series, the wartime farm series, all that good stuff, go check that out too. And Peter Ginn, if you're listening, anytime, buddy, you just name your day. Yeah, you're next. You're next. Thank you so much for joining me today, Ruth. So I want to start with this question that I think is one of the more interesting things about you.

So you came to history and historical education in a different way than most people, I think. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that may have influenced? your path to social and domestic history? I married into it. We were very young. And my husband had been interested in historical reenactment since he was 12. Wow. And when I first heard about it, I thought, you know, I sort of heard the stories.

Rather like you might hear your partner had been in the scout or something. I didn't really take a huge amount to notice. And then a scant four weeks after, we got married and as I say, we were married very young. He said, come on then, off we go, what? You want me to do what? I beg your pardon, what? And so it started there, really. When we arrived at the first sort of thing we went to,

I was very dubious about the idea of reenacting battles. And to be honest, I still am. I worry about the glorification of war that it's not a terribly honest thing to do. that it's also something that is very oddly political with a small P, this glorification of conflict and war. And yeah, it still worries me, actually. It's not something I feel terribly comfortable with.

However, the people can be great. They're really an eclectic mix of some really nice people. And very quickly, we sort of segued away from the military sort of idea into the idea of living history. and that absolutely touched a button for me, almost instantaneously. I found myself wanting to find out more about ordinary people and the way ordinary people do things and what they believed and how they felt. And I just wanted to know, it was more like being an anthropologist than anything else,

what was it like to be a human being in that skin, in that society, in that time and place? And the more I found out that just the deeper it drew me. So it starts as a hobby, not, I don't have an academic background. And it's just a hobby that I followed sort of on my own, really, having my own interests. And that gives you a certain freedom rather than having to follow an established course. I could research the things that I was interested in and take it wherever it led. And I think the very first things I really got frustrated with was the lack of information about ordinary women's lives, particularly. women's lives and particularly ordinary. I mean, feminist history, this is back in the 1980s.

I mean, you know, dinosaurs still roamed the earth. I'm old. But in the 18s, you know, there was lots of sort of what you might call feminist history. But to me, it didn't really feel very feminine. It all seemed to be like men and the, you know, women and the law, women and the church, women and paid work. It all sounded like women and the man's world. And there was next, and the to nothing, and there still is, next to nothing about the ordinary business of being a human being and of an ordinary women's lives. It seems to me, for example, that housework has been the central craft for womankind for centurists. So where are the books written about that? Where are they? Who's writing about that sort of thing? You know, and looking for that,

I mean, the very first thing I wanted to know was how do people do the washing up? nothing. Libraries empty. Book cut shops, empty. There's nothing on the shelves. Nobody else seemed interested in what I considered to be the routine, the domestic, the ordinary, the business of living, how we stay alive as human beings. And yeah, it's fascinated me from the first and still does. It is, it is really fascinating. It's funny. So my family hasn't been in the States for very long, but I grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts. So it's very ingrained in that part of my childhood. And as a child, I went to Pilgrim Camp because that was sort of something that everybody does, which no one outside of Plymouth, Massachusetts ever does. But I learned to churn butter as a child.

And I remember realizing as an adult that no one knows how butter gets made, and that blew me away. I was like, what do you mean? You don't know that butter is just cream that you just whip until it's butter. So, I mean, you know, it was an interesting way to grow up for sure. And I think it has a lot of things that people don't understand. understand. So butter is one of the things I know how to do, but basically nothing else. So in the pandemic, I was very, very popular. It was like, do you want to know how to make your own butter? I know we have that problem as a family because obviously, you know, I started this sort of journey

into history with my husband and then later on when we had, you know, offspring, you know, it became a very much a family affair and remained so. And so all of us have these sorts of, just like you with the churning of the butter. We have a lot of those sorts of practical experiences. and you just don't know that other people don't know it. Right. It's just you take it utterly for granted that the whole world knows what you're on about. And they just give you these blank looks. You go, oh, oh, it's another one of those, is it?

It happens a lot. Yes, yes, it does. But it's funny. At Pilgrim Camp, you get this ideology, sorry, excuse me, like an identity. And they give it to you at the beginning of Pilgrim Camp and you live it out for the rest of Pilgrim Camp. But I was Hannah, I was 12. I was the primary Butter Turner in the family. and then I died, like, about halfway through Pilgrim camp,

which was not, like, integral at all to understanding Puritan society, I feel like. So my character just sort of, like, hung out in the background with everyone else. They were like, you're dead. You're not allowed to, like, interact. Yeah, but, you know, infant mortality isn't important. It is. It is. But I was kind of like, my parents paid money for this.

So I guess, you know, I got to live as a ghost for a week, which was interesting. So I do want to jump back a little bit to something you said. about the histories of regular people. So I do think it's interesting for folks who don't engage with history that much, that people would choose to study and write about regular people, right? Because we get so focused in school

on the dates, the names, the big people that change cultural or historical significance. So why do you think it's important for us to study those regular lives? Yeah, well, let's be careful. The big people who changed historical and cultural significance, who says so? I'd like to make this really big point here

And, you know, it's, okay, let's take it backwards. Like, if you had to say who was perhaps in all of history, one of the most important, influential, long-term military and sort of like world leaders, you might choose somebody like, I don't know, Napoleon. Yeah? Yeah. Big figure. Yeah?

Everybody's heard of him with big impact. But if, looking back with hindsight, blah, blah, blah, blah, we were to compare how much he's changed the world in comparison to the British habit of drinking tea. Yeah, you see, you're thinking it through. And that's regular people. You see, we are told that it's these historic figures who change the world. I'm not that convinced. I think, you know, I think they're a bit like, you know, when you make a big stew and the scum

rises to the top. Yeah, I sort of feel a bit like that. It's the stew that matters. Right, you skim off the other stuff and you toss it in the garbage. Yeah. But I mean, we live in a society globally in which these leaked people are held up as being somehow better, more important than the rest of us. And that's drilled in twists from childhood from every direction. But remember, history has been written by those.

elite men's brothers, sons, great nephews. They were the ones who wrote the history. They were the relative, they're writing their own family history. Traditionally, until very recently, almost all history was simply the family history of the rich. It doesn't, you know, and that has skewed our whole understanding

of what is important and what is not important and what history is. And, you know, those of us who perhaps don't come from those backgrounds, we have to scream and shout very loudly and wave a lot of flags to get noticed at all. And I would just like to put it out there. The tea drinking has had more impact than Napoleon. So what are you doing now the way you live as an ordinary regular person that is shaping the world? Loads. And that's what I think, you know, history ought to be about us. That's fascinating. No, no, no, that's... Sorry, little right, right, but it's wonderful. Actually, it's going to have me jump ahead and ask you my next question because I think it's, you know, in this podcast, we talk a lot about what the future looks like in all of our respective fields. And so I want to talk about a little bit about what you think the future of daily people looks like, especially now that we've sort of moved into this very modern, very internet-driven global society. Do you think we're impacting each other that way?

Or do you think maybe we'll lose sort of our interest in the social media and come back to more of a local sort of structure? Well, I think the edge of social media has already worn off, hasn't it? I don't think it's ever going to go away again. It's here to stay with us, I think. But the deep enthusiasm and almost evangelical belief in it all has already shaded off. You know, that's starting to come back to sort of more levels of sensible reality. you see that a lot happening with new things come in, people get very enthusiastic, they embrace it whole scale.

You know, you get a few Luddites who won't play, me, for example. I'm a terrible Luddite. But in general, you know, such people are bold, you know, it happens again and again and again. And then after that initial enthusiasm, people start to spot the problems with whatever the new thing is. And a more nuanced, more sort of blended approach takes over in the long term. We saw the same emotional and intellectual responses to things like the railways when they first came in.

I mean, you know, if you were to read a lot of the letter writing about the first printing presses, you'll find so many of the same sort of trajectories and things going on. I think it's a normal process. Yeah. I mean, when spiritualism first came out, we were all into talking to the dead. And I don't know anybody that talks to the dead very routinely now. Yeah. And then it's sort of like, yeah, calm's down again.

So I don't know, I mean, nobody knows what the future will bring. And certainly, you know, there's no way we're going to go back. There's no point to going back. And there's no benefit in going back. Partly because, I mean, again, if we think about the way people live, the way you live when there are a thousand people in a place the size of Britain is not going to be the same as the way you live when there are 10,000 people. It's not going to be the same as the way you live when there are 100,000.

It's not going to be the same as when you have a million. You have to adapt as the population rises. You need different things. Britain is thought, I mean, we're small. I think with this, I don't know, in comparison to the United States, it's so tiny as a geographical area. I mean, it's smaller than any one of your states, isn't it? But when, before there was agriculture, hunter-gatherers,

we think that only between five and 10,000 people lived in Britain. That's all. Yeah, I mean, it's small, but even so. Imagine the whole of Britain now, which has its, I don't know, we're on 35, how many million are we on now? I don't know, that's 60 or 70. You know, a few thousand people. But because they were scattered out, they didn't need to worry about things like retreats.

It didn't matter. Yeah? The way you behave and the way you behave in the resources is one thing. Once you've got a settled population, then just going everywhere in the woods, it's no longer possible. And you've got to start having things like latrines and organized supply. And that works great when you're at village densities. And then you start having urban centres grow and you have cities grow.

And then people have to change their behaviour. They have to do things differently. And obviously, if we're going to talk drains, then you have to have drains. But it changes your behaviour on everything else. How you behave to strain. You can't acknowledge everybody you walk past in a city. You go nuts. You can't know everybody's name.

You've got to find a new way of being with all these new people. And as the population density. rises, we've had to reinvent the way we live many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times over. We can't go back. You know, you can't go back. We would all start. Or get cholera, you know. Or get cholera or whatever. You know, it's just not feasible to try and sort of turn the clock back. But that, you know, that's these things they don't go away, but we find a new way of living. We, we reconstruct a new system. As each new sort of thing comes in, we reinvent what it is to be a society.

That's a good thing. I'm actually sort of struck by that too, because we recently reached the 8 billion people mark on the planet Earth, which terrifies me in a lot of ways because it seems like there's too many of us. But at the same time, you know, I wonder, you know, maybe there's one million people that are famous that we would, you know, give that category to that are rich, wealthy. And then the rest of us are all just participating in this sort of regular advertising. manned daily life. And I think we forget that the numerics are tipped in our favor in a lot of ways.

Absolutely. So, you know, I'm thinking in terms of, you know, revolution and some of the things that I think we maybe need to start addressing, you know, our Elon Musk problems, our total financial inequity. You know, we have the advantage of having way more people on our side participating in this sort of daily life multitude down here. And to your point about, you know, tea drinking, changing more of history than Napoleon, I think maybe we should think about that a little bit more, you know, mindfully in that we have those numbers. We have the ability to change history. We just maybe don't realize it as a collective yet. And I think that's partly about starting to question what is history, what is the movement of people and the movement of

ideas and what does it mean. I think history is really quite important politically with a small peak. I don't mean in sort of modern, you know, what I think really what history tells us is that everything changes, constantly changes, that there is no such thing as we've always done it like that. It's not true. It doesn't matter what you look at. We have not always done it like that. As soon as you start looking in detail, it turns out we've done it many, many, many, many, many, many, many different ways in almost every aspect from the wearing of glasses to, to, you know, the teaching of children. I mean, we have tried so many systems. So in the past, and it has changed so often. And what that tells us, of course, is, well, you know, don't worry about it, but it's going

to change again. Change is the only constant. And I think that's a very empowering message. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean you're stuck with it. It can be hard to make things change, but they're going to change anyway. So you might just as well get on board and make it change the way you want it to change. Right. And that sort of brings me into my next point because I'm going to talk a little bit about the pandemic that we of all just experienced collectively as a globe. So since 2020, the BBC Farm series that you've done have been a lot of my mind for what I think are really obvious reasons. So I know that your work has led you to adopt some of these like less modern domestic tips and tricks in general.

Are there any that came more handy than others while we lived through quarantine? And what in your opinion are the most important skills that tutors, Victorians, Elizabethan, Englanders, head that we lack right now. I always get asked this, and it's a really difficult one, because I think many of the lessons are quite sort of airy-fairy in a way. I think it's what I really value from a sort of a living in the past is more control. If you have to make everything at some point or other, you understand it in a way. If you have to sort of, you have to sort of, if you live without, you have to sort of deconstruct,

what is it I want, what is it, I don't want. You're making much more informed choices, that active choices. You're not just going with the flow. I value that more than anything. So it turns up in many ways. I mean, cleaning products. Once you've had to, you know, live in the past

without said modern cleaning products, the first question you ask is, yeah, but I'm managing fine. So why the hell am I still buying this rubbish? I really not need in it. So why am I buying it? I mean, what is it? What does it do?

When it says on the packet, it's a bathroom cleaner. Yeah, but what's in it? What am I putting all over my bathroom? I'd like to know, please. I'd like to be able to make the choice and not just which brand am I going to buy. I want to know what am I spreading around the place and exposing myself and my family too? And indeed, what am I flushing down into the environment? I want to know about it. And I think it's more that sort of attitude of mind is that I've really drawn from the past than anything else. because people in the past did have to make those sorts of decisions all the time. They couldn't rely on the advertising, I suppose, to sort of channel them and shape them.

And I've very much noticed that modern people do. Modern people are utterly led by what they're seeing. They're not really consciously thinking about it. I think most of us are unconsciously being shepherded through life by a series of advertising messages. And it's really rather nice to have that taken away and to start asking your own questions, becoming more in charge of what you do and don't do. And it's not perhaps the sort of answers you wanted. Everybody asks me that question.

And as I say, almost every journalist I ever speak to asks me that question. And what they want are fabulous. I'm not a journalist, so I'm surprised. Yeah, it's very much. There's two questions I get asked. That's one of them. And the other one is, so what part of history would you want to live in? Obviously, the answer is now.

I mean, honestly, have they ever tried living without a washing machine? Just for a couple months and it was... It's bad, isn't it? It's really bad. I think washing machine... People often try and tell me that the pill is the innovation that gives women's liberation. I'm not sure I believe it. I think it's the washing machine. Those people did not have small children that poop through like those ones every 10 seconds.

Oh, thank you. I will do it for like one washcloth and then I will be like, okay, the rest are going in the washing machine. Plug me into that machine. Thank God for washing machine. The most important machine on the planet. Our answers,

our answers may be different if we were men, I suppose, because we wouldn't have to worry about whether we had a washing machine or not. No, we could just palm, outsource that to somebody else. Yes. Which is traditionally what bloke's done. Men have always had washing machines in some form. Yeah. If you've ever been stuck with it.

Anyway, but I mean, I do use some practices from the past. For example, my washing machine, I don't put any powder in it or indeed anything else. I just run it on water because I quickly discovered when I was doing Tudor laundry in streams that just bashing your clothes and water works remarkably well. It's extremely efficient. You put, you know, and of course that's what a washing machine does. It just sort of soaks and bashes your clothes. Unless you've got something super greasy, in which case you might.

you know, use a bit of some form of detergent or soap to sort of cut that. But I mean super greasy. Most ordinary living dirt just washes out in water. And then you can feel smug. You know, you've just saved a load of money, not buying all those products. And you've also done less pollution to the atmosphere, you know, particularly to the waterways. So it's double smug. Marvellous. Yeah. Okay. History letting you feel better than your neighbors. Oh, the other thing, I mean, at the time when I first tried that, I was living in a very hard water area. I'm sure it must have the same in different areas over there,

but some areas in Britain we have a lot of lime in the water in some areas we have very little. And I was living in an area with a lot of lime. So one's clothes can become really stiff, but not if you don't use the soap. It turns out that much of that soateness is a chemical reaction between the lime and the soap. So if you take the soap out, you've got, so therefore you don't need the fabric softener's either. That's fantastic. Double smoke. I know, it's amazing, isn't that?

It's just like, yeah, and? Okay. I'll go, this seems to work. You know, so there are things like that that do move over into my modern life. Certainly a great appreciation of washing machines. And I really like central heating, too. I can tell you, I love central heating. Britain is not the hottest of places.

I live in New England, so it's like... that generally lasts about two weeks. You know, the rest of the time it's cold. It's pretty cold here too. We unfortunately are wood stove driven, which is great in the one room that the wood stove is in and less good in the rest of the rooms. Yeah, yeah.

It's a different way I live in, isn't it? Yes. And then, you know, all the wood has to get cut. So you don't have heat if you don't do the work, which is, you know. Yeah. It's a different way I live in. Yeah.

So, yeah, and there are, you know, I mean, I certainly during the pandemic, Mick was very pleased to have access to a garden. Thank God I was so lucky to have access to a garden. I did a lot of gardening. But then I did that beforehand anyway. I've always been a garden. I was brought up in a family in which gardening was a thing.

So I'm not sure if that was even talked to me by history, but it was just more of a family tradition. Huh. That's really cool. Yeah, we started gardening a lot more during the pandemic, simply because we had more time. You know, nobody was really driving more. More time, yeah, exactly.

But yeah, I suppose we were just trying to achieve that beforehand, but not quite getting there because of the timing aspect. I think sometimes that's it, that some of those things that people have sort of like had bumbling along in the background were really brought to a much more prominence in our lives. And then they've begun to sort of slide back out slightly. But it don't think it did us any harm, did it, to be reminded that some of those old practices have value. Right. And a lot more people started leaning on those. And we have a lot more neighbors now that have livestock than ever before. Yeah.

And it's good, isn't it, in a sense, to sort of like recharge our skill batteries as a society. And there may be, as you say, you're unusual of your age to know how to make your own butter. Good for you. But, you know, my daughter can make butter too. She's a very fine dairy mode. Quite a lot of us sort of revisited a number of skills. I mean, I also saw an upsurge in things like people doing sewing and hand crafting, And, you know, people's skill level might not have been very, people increase their skill level.

And even if it now fades away again, that knowledge has sort of like been pulled through another generation. That's useful. And I think a lot of us living modernly, especially someone of the younger generations, lost a lot of that ancestral knowledge. You know, that really died with our grandparents in a lot of ways. And so now we're sort of rediscovering it via the internet or via, you know, elder people that are still in our lives. And I think the pandemic sort of let us discover those things, which was... Exactly. It gave people a space to rediscover and a new context so that it didn't just feel like old people's stuff, so that it felt like it had a relevance to the new and to the modern, which of course it does. You know, I would very much like, I'm one of the things that I'm

watching fade out of British society is understanding of fire. I think you've got a different picture in the States. I think you've still got a lot of people with a lot of room to be quite to free with fire to have regular interaction with it. But it's pretty much been stamped out of normal experience in Britain. We're so cramped in and close together that, you know, there aren't very many places where you can light a fire. I mean, in many areas it's completely illegal to even have a fire in your garden because people worry about smoke and so forth.

And part of that is sensible regulation. But a lot of it is actually because they know so little about fire, they're frightened of it. Yeah. So people push through extra, extra rigid. No, we can't. We can't. Oh, it'd be terrible. It'd be terrible. There might be smoke. Oh, my God. We're all going to die of burning. And when people do have a little bit of fire, they've got no experience whatsoever. So then they are dangerous. Seriously dangerous. One of the problems with fire that we had during the pandemic was a number of barbecues that actually burnt down several houses in London.

Yeah. People had no experience. They just didn't know the basics of fire safety. I find that worrying that we've got a popular. is so ignorant about the basics. And they make some silly choices as a result. Yeah. I mean, and truth, like what could you possibly know about fire? You know, that's in our news cycle. It's basically that California's on fire all the time. So it does, I think in a way, seem more scary than maybe it would if we didn't have a 24-hour global news cycle, right? I mean, maybe we wouldn't have lost that knowledge in the UK so much

if we didn't think California was literally burning all the time, like uncontrollably. Exactly. Exactly. And without personal experience, people, you know, they just take all that stuff at face value without really being able to temper it and put it within its own context. And, you know, that very much is an issue. And again, there's a lot of historical ways of living that are like that, that, like you're saying about with livestock, how much interaction people have with chickens or whatever. It informs how you behave about other things, how you think about. your life, but also it informs things like the legislature, what sorts of rules are going to be brought in? If you've got people who have no personal experience of it, you're not going to get sensible laws, are you? Right. Yeah, it's interesting. So in the state that I'm in, I'm not sure about the rest of the states, but we have, we have certain towns that have the ability to farm in certain towns that don't. So we live in a farm town. So we live in a farm town. So we have chickens, we have sheep, we have ducks. But just a couple towns over, they don't have any ability to do that at all. So you have to rely. on either neighbors that live in towns that farms are legal, or you have to use a grocery store. And I imagine that was a little scarier when grocery stores were sort of unreliable or they seemed

dangerous if you had, you know, preexisting conditions. Yeah. There can be lots of things. I mean, I also, I was doing another interview with somebody not very long ago in the States. And I was very shocked. They were asking about laundry. And I was very shocked to discover that in some areas, it's illegal to dry your laundry outdoors. and that I can't tell you how much that that shocked me.

I didn't know that either. You know, the idea that one can't use the natural ultraviolet light to sterilize your laundry is it's just shocking. You know, and you worry about like people's health, don't you? I mean, outdoor drying is just so hygienic. It's so safe. And of course it does no harm whatsoever to the environment. it's like it's much better than running a machine to dry your clothes.

Is it like solely like a nobody can see your knickers outside? Like is that is the children? I have no idea what the thinking was. I was, I didn't really know what to say. It's it's funny though. Like this is true. The United States is so big. And so like the rules change everywhere that I don't know any of the laws in other states.

And I'm always surprised to find things like this. Because to be honest with you, I've never even asked if it's legal and Massachusetts, but I've never thought that it might be illegal. No, well, I haven't either. It was a bit of a shot. I suppose I should probably ask before I do my laundry next. Where do you do your laundry? Yes.

Yeah. That's so wild to me. Oh, my God. I'm like, I'm literally going to start Googling that when we're done talking. Like, what state is illegal to put out your laundry? Somewhere down south, if I remember, but I can't remember which state it was. So I do want to circle back just a little bit to our conversation about, you know, getting things over the pandemic and adopting some of those skills. And one of the things that I keep being

struck by, I think, is thinking about the Victorian era and how, you know, in Victorian times, I think they had started to move forward in all these places in industry. You know, everything was like, oh my gosh, it's a new market. We're starting all of these companies and these easier ways to do things. And then we found out over time that a lot of those things tended to be very, very poisonous, you know, in our medicines, in our house paint, in the toilet systems. And I'm wondering if we're going to start seeing a lot more of that happening now in modern times with all of these modern conveniences. And even now we're finding, you know, more and more microplastics in our food and in our water systems. I mean, it's inevitable, isn't it?

Nobody ever tests for everything. No matter how conscientious people are when they come up with a new idea, you can't test for everything on the long term. I mean, some of these things have taken decades to appear as issues. that's always again going to be part of the process of making mistakes. One does one's best, one hopes, except in the companies that don't, who lie and cheat and, you know, hide all the evidence because they can make money. And I don't think that's going to change either, is it? There are going to be liars and cheats forever, really. Right.

Our mission always is to sort of try and be the people who try and see clearly. And it's not easy to see clearly. to question things, to look at different angles, to be open to the idea that just because everybody says so doesn't mean it's true. We need a population in which large numbers of us do that. We need to be a more sort of vigilant species, keeping an eye on ourselves, really. We need that. We always have done it to some degree, and we need it more than ever because there's more people moving in more direction. reflections. It's an ongoing problem, not something confined to the past, not something of some

sort of, oh my God, the world's going to hell in a handcart, sort of. It's a continuity, isn't it? There have always been bad people and stupid people and misled people, and, you know, people who do things with the best intentions, but get it wrong. We also know the people who find out. Keep talking very general terms, and I suspect you want lots of specifics, but these are the lessons of history. human beings, we have certain drives and urges, and those are always there. And there is no fixed way of dealing with this. There is no fixed pattern. It's always changing and evolving. And at any person, wherever they are in history, you can all you can do is with your best life and do what you can with the problems that face you now. I'm sorry, it sounds very vague and philosophical.

And then you keep asking me philosophy questions. Oh, sorry. Okay, so what would you tell people who are starting to learn how to do their own butter or wash their own laundry? I mean, I guess We're just, we're using our washing machines, but just no soap. You know, I do think, my husband called it critical thinking. It's important. It's about, you know, the past is useful if you think about it. It's absolutely a straight jacket if you just follow it. It can be the most terrible deadening thing if you just do as you're told and follow the line.

We've always done it like this. I'm going to carry on doing it. Dreadful. One needs to be the sort of person who looks at the past as well as you look at the past, as well as you look at the present and say, that's useful, that's a load of rubbish. I don't think this. Why that? Are you sure? But then that's also some of the pleasure involved

of being somebody who enjoys history. That's why I find it so pleasurable that why? How does that match up with, are you sure? It's detective work, you know, at its most basic. It is trying to work things out from clues, and some of it might seem set in stone, but it isn't really when you start looking closer. It's all much more sort of, oh yeah, if, when, but maybe in this case, but not in that case.

It's a much more subtle and complex. And that makes it intriguing, exciting and an intellectual challenge. You know, the past can be fun. I mean, if you think about how you would describe a story in modern times, like even how we describe the news, like all of our news channels, for better or for worse have different ways of describing the same event and all of our people that attend to that event have the same thing. And applying that, I think, to how we understand history and understanding that there's not one major narrative, one major truth, but all of the little pieces of that, I think, help people sort of grapple this idea that history isn't boring. It's not names and dates of Napoleon's battles.

It's how the modern people change the world by drinking tea. Exactly. And it's also that, you know, well, there's lots of things that. If you do something, one of the farms series we did was in the wartime, 1930s, 1940s. And that brought up a whole different behaviour in people you were dealing with. Because one gets an awful lot of, no, it's not, that's not it was like. I remember it was like this, we did this. Yeah, you did, but not them over there. and he did something differently. He has a different experience. But people tend to think that their experience is the only one true, holy experience. Because I did it like this, this is the way to see it and the method through. And we all feel like that, you know, even if we're sort of aware,

some of us are a bit more aware of it than others. But even if you've got it at your head, you still can't help yourself. We all see it like, that's my truth of the past. and it's a really difficult thing to wrestle with how many truths there are. And certainly when you're doing with things within living memory, you really get that right in your face. People tell you straight away, right, to the first place and personal. And remembering that, as you look at any period of history,

when there aren't, you know, perhaps further back, when there aren't people to shout at you and say, but I remember it differently. Did that make wartime farm slightly more difficult or challenging than some of the other series? It made it different. I mean, in some ways you see, it's, you know, it is fabulous in the sense that it makes it very easy to gather different evidence, but it can also be difficult to manage. Yeah, it's different. You see, I'm researching any historical period can be different like that.

When I first, Tudor is my first love and I'm much, much more knowledgeable on that later Elizabethan sort of era than I am on any other era. and there's not a huge amount of information from that period. It's reasonable, but it's not vast. If you then move to say the Victorian, then the amount of published information is just overwhelming. And you find yourself needing completely different skills. In one area, you might be like, you know, sort of like looking under a microscope in a sense,

a small piece of evidence and trying to match it with a tiny little fragment here and a little echo over there. That's one set of skills. within the Victorian you've got this mass of libraries sort of like falling on top of you and your skill is simply to sort of like survive the beating and find a way through it. You know, like I've got to edit and select. So which bit am I going to look at, you know? And that's a completely different set of skills.

And like because when you wove into the 20th century, once you start to get a lot of film and personal experience and different sorts of evidence, again, you've got to learn different ways of filtering it, of managing it, of finding meaning within it. And of course, historians of the future are going to struggle really with this new digital age. How is the information spread and how real is it and how relevant is it or how, you know, I mean, it's very easy, for example, to see something on a social media site and it's got like

two million clicks or something and think that that, therefore, is an important fault. It might just be a cat video. It should be a cat video, I think. It should be a cat video. Let's be honest. It's what the internet is for, is for. cat videos. But, you know, people are going to have to be aware of those sorts of issues and be very careful about how they select. What are, you know, the loudest, the brightest,

the best presented is not necessarily the truth. And, you know, yeah, different skills. Yeah. So my last question, and I know we chatted a little bit about this before we started recording, but are we ever going to get a new installment of the farm series? And can I petition for like a 1980s, like rural Britain? 1980s. 1980s, there wasn't much left of it were written by 1980s, I can assure you. I guess that's fair, so it would be very short.

No, well, probably not. I mean, the last one we filmed was, well, about a decade ago now. And fashions in telechanged, don't they? One is constantly at the behest of whatever somebody who commissions programs thinks will fly. it's very open to cycles of fashion and interpretation and it's very subjective. So, yeah, and people like me have absolutely no say whatsoever.

We just do as we're told. We can ask our listeners. If not the Farm Series, then Victorian Pharmacy, because I do think we should use some more knowledge of how to apply, you know, herbs and also probably cocaine and arsenic back into our medicine supplies. Arsenic's terribly handy, you know. All sorts of things with us. I can only imagine, you know.

It really has lost favor, I think, since, you know, the embalming of, you know, the 19th century. A few high profile murder cases are that useful substance whisked away. But it is effective. So if you do want someone dead, that's pretty much the way to go. Not that I'm advocating for that. No, no, no, no, no, no. Of course not. Well, thank you so much.

This has been an absolute pleasure. where can people find you if they're looking for more of you? Oh God, I don't know. I haven't written books. Google. Yes, read all of your books because they're absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Take care.