Author Description

<p> </p><p> <p>A time-travelling, genealogical adventure, <br>bringing pre-industrial, rural, eighteenth-century England vividly to life on<br>the page.<b> <p><br></b>One day Ian Marchant, acclaimed author of books<br>on music, railways and pubs, decided, as all<br>men of a certain age must, to have a dig around his family history.<br>Surprisingly quickly, a web search informed him that his seven-times-great<br>great-grandfather, Thomas Marchant had left a detailed diary from 1714 to 1728.<br>So far, so jolly ... <p><br>Life-loving diarist Thom - who liked a drink and a game of cards - feels<br>recognisably Marchant to Ian. With fascinating detail we learn about Thom's<br>family farm and fishponds; about dung, horses and mud; about beer, the wife's<br>nights out, his own job troubles and their shared worries for their children.<br>But as Ian digs deeper beyond the Sussex diary's bucolic portrait he discovers<br>a subtext - a family descended from immigrants, with anti-establishment<br>politics, who are struggling with illness, political instability and cash<br>crises - just as their country does three centuries on. <p><br>'When I was reflecting late one January evening<br>on the differences between Thom and me, I realised the unbridgeable thing that<br>comes between us is industrialisation. He lived right at its beginning, while I<br>am living somewhere towards its end. Old Thom Marchant was one of the last<br>people before industrialisation to understand how his world worked - and how to<br>be largely self-sufficient in it. He knew where his food came from, his fuel, <br>his water, his clothes. He knew how the welfare system worked, and was part of<br>its administration; he knew who looked after the roads, too. He collected<br>taxes. He was not separate from the system, but part of it.'<i> <p><br></i>Rich with immersive detail, One Fine Day<br>draws a living portrait of Marchant family life in the 1720s and how their<br>England (rainy, muddy, politically turbulent,