I am not a Historian.
I wish I was. And I most fervently, feverishly even wish that, rather than wasting time with Sociology for three years at University, a discipline with plenty of theory on offer but absolutely no beauty whatsoever, I’d chosen to study History instead.
The folly, ironically, of youth.
As far as history is concerned, I have the greatest respect for the men and women that have dedicated their lives to the rigorous study and research demanded of exploring and explaining our past.
It would be no exaggeration to say that I am even in awe of some of them.
Yet, in further retrospect, I do wonder if some of my books wouldn’t quite have had the success they did, had I written them from a purely historical perspective.
Take, for example, Ruins & Follies of East Anglia (Amberley, 2019).
Had I done so then it would, no doubt, have been full of historical facts and figures. But then it also might have ended up as a rather too concise piece of work, one overflowing with the historical minutiae that embraces each of the special sites I visited within it’s pages.
But as I am not a Historian you can rest assured that this book only flirts with that sort of discipline.
I guess that, because I write from the heart rather than the head, it makes my books exactly what I want them to be: accessible, user friendly and entertaining.
One critic recently described me as ‘…the people’s writer’, which I loved whilst another reader recently dropped me a line saying, ‘I love your Harnser’s Blog-thoroughly entertaining and inciteful observations….I think, in the spirit of George Orwell, an observer and chronicler of the “real world”’.
Orwell is something of a literary god to me. So that meant a lot.
So, what am I exactly?
What I most definitely am is an dreamer; an explorer and inescapable romantic, a man who lets his heart rule his head, one who seeks story and wonder in everything he sees.
Which is why I am so very happy that the good people at Amberley Publishing have entrusted me with two more books in my Ruins & Follies series, both of which will be published next year, namely Ruins & Follies of Sussex and Hampshire and Ruins & Follies of Surrey and London.
You thought Michael Portillo spent a lot of time on trains? I’ll be helping fund the train drivers pay rise over the next eighteen months or so.
As with the original book, both of these new volumes will be intended as something to accompany the reader on their visits to the places listed.
Hopefully they’ll encourage people to lose themselves in some of them just as I am always able to do so-even if some of them are not accessible, are structurally dangerous or on privately owned land.
What’s important is for the reader to use their imaginations as they explore or espy each of these sights.
Our imaginations are an underused and unvalued resource, the joys of which are all too easily lost as we grow up. To you and me a cardboard box is a cardboard box, a receptacle for carrying things in, something functional and lifeless.
Yet, to a child, it can be a ship, a tank or a spacecraft, there are no limits to the places that a simple box can take them to.
So why not indulge in the same riot of imagination when you next explore the ruins of an old church or feast your heart and mind upon a building that was designed and built in the manner it was simply because someone wanted form and function to be replaced by flair and fantasy?
How utterly wonderful a motive that is.
When you open the door of a folly, you also, just as its architect did, open one to the imagination.
Let yours have a treat someday.
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I have a copy of Ruins & Follies of East Anglia waiting to be given away to a reader of this blog. If you’d like to have a chance of winning it, please e mail me at edward@couzenslakemedia.com with BOOK in the subject line. I will pick a winner in the next week or so and send it to them.
