Changing perspectives

‘Could you account for everything that surrounds you in the course of a single second?’ asks one of the characters in Peter Ackroyd’s first play for radio, Chatterton: The Allington Solution (Thursday). ‘All the intentions, the wishes, motives, perceptions, judgments that swirl around any one of us.’ It’s a provocative question. And especially now in 2008 that we are bombarded by information, tempting diversions and constant external hubbub. How can we tune in to what we are thinking and make sense of our own reactions, thoughts and feelings, let alone take note of the bigger picture around us? And yet if we can’t begin to understand and record the true reality of our own situation, at this particular moment in time, how can we possibly hope to understand the past? History, Ackroyd teasingly suggests, is nothing but a good story; and the better the historian, then the better told the story.