Dear Jean-Claude and Jake the Ranger,

Anyone who thinks there is a right and a wrong side of history has never listened to Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s The Rest is History. This splendid podcast shows us that history is extraordinarily complicated and rarely draws a clean line between right and wrong, good and evil. Much of history seems to be a violent collision of good intentions, and sometimes what appears ethically obvious today has its way of turning tomorrow. History reflects our shambolic nature and is seldom settled, stable, or simple.

Jean-Claude, I don’t know which side of history I inhabit. What I can say is that I suspect I stand where most do – among the uncertain, the ambivalent, the baffled, the conflicted, the undecided, the tentative, and the cautious. I stand with the spirit and with the soul and live within the ache and joy of the present moment. I ‘Pluck the day, trusting as little as possible to the future’ – Carpe diem! as Horace proclaimed.

Humans are messy, and it can be dangerous to deny our common fallibility by drawing up lines that separate and divide. Right side? Wrong side? Mostly, we are the mess in the middle, dazed within a fog of unknowing, stunned by life and amazed by it too, and all the more beautiful for it.

Love, Nick