What brought you joy yesterday? Do tell me, especially if it related to Hillary Mantel.
Yesterday I set off east with the Wolf Hall Trilogy in my ears. Through Lincoln’s Inn to Chancery Lane; down Fleet Street and up Ludgate; past St. Paul’s; through Leadenhall Market and on to The Tower. My final stop a Thai Green Chicken Curry for a tenner in Borough Market, a better fate than many of Mantel’s characters.
Today I went west. It was surreal weaving through Friday’s throng, skirting Covent Garden, as outsider Thomas Cromwell made his bones in Tudor times. First stop was St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a site where Big King Henry put a church to stop plague victims getting too close. The James Gibb beauty that replaced it is one of the most significant ecclesiastical buildings the world. You’ll get a good steak and ale pie in the café-in-the-crypt. S’s mum Cindy went to school here, getting a bus from the Edgeware Road, and remembers hens running round Trafalgar Square. Watching Pelicans gifted to Charles II from the Russian Ambassador feed frenziedly from the bridge on the lake in St. James’ Park was a hilarious first, though none caught a ten pound carp.
I have gone to bed with Tudors of every rank for some time now and I like Cromwell is the best, just as Mantell wants. He and she know what I am thinking before I do. This morning he is in his pomp at the King’s right hand- I missed some years shenanigans overnight- but I don’t rewind. Anne Bolyn’s having a pregnant pageant on the Thames- sixteen knights with bells afoot are holding her aloft- in the vicinity of the Blackwall Tunnel. I won’t give away the ending.
Think, then write. That’s how you make sense the world and your place in it; how you reason and persuade and debate. Read. Reading is how you become knowledgeable and articulate; read often and widely, be eclectic in your tastes. Then you’ll be more confident when you test nascent and imperfect theses. We owe a debt to our finest storytellers because they bring things to life in ways we never could. But more than that, they educate us. If you want to speak well and write well there’s no shortcut: listen to and read the best stories.
Hillary Mantel was the best of storytellers, she changed our view of Thomas Cromwell and brought new life to the Tudor Court. But success was a slow burn. Wolf Hall, the one we remember, the one that made her famous, is her tenth novel. She had health issues her entire life but found purpose in prose. She had a glint in her eye and devilment always.
What a life.