Several days into January, a friend I spent New Year’s Eve with emails me a list of resolutions I was publicly obliged to make that evening, along with those made by everyone else present, arranged on a sort of spreadsheet. On reading it over, I make myself the additional promise that I will never again get drunk in the company of people with a propensity to write things down.
“I have no idea what I was thinking,” I say.
“At least yours are doable,” my wife says, scrolling through the list on an iPad.
“‘Write a play’? What’s doable about that?”
“I’ve got to walk uphill,” she says.
“I could have just said read more biographies,” I say. “Or get more sunlight.”
“I also have to go to the theatre, and sometimes enjoy it,” my wife says.
“You can come to my play,” I say.
“And sometimes enjoy it,” she says.
“I can’t guarantee that.”
“What’s your play going to be about?” my wife says.
“Stop putting pressure on me,” I say. Darkness falls.
Late morning, the following Sunday. A man lies in a deep bath, reading a biography of Alexander Hamilton given to him by his oldest son for Christmas. According to the back cover, the book provided the inspiration for the award-winning Broadway musical Hamilton. It is 750 pages long. After two weeks the man is only on page 194. There are no songs in it so far.
In the next room the man’s wife is lying in bed listening to The Archers’ omnibus. In a scene familiar from a lunchtime broadcast the previous week, local pariah Rob Titchener is trying to buy some things from the village shop, which has just closed for the evening. Rob is at first insistent, then abusive.
After the war, Alexander Hamilton settles with his family in New York to set up a law practice. Having until recently been occupied by British forces, the city is riven by factionalism: returning patriots seize property from loyalists; Tories are tarred and feathered in the streets, and a large section of the population faces exile. With the future stability of the nascent republic at stake, Hamilton takes a brave stand, defending the rights of British sympathisers in court.
As he reads, the man imagines that if he had lived in those turbulent times, he, too, would have been unafraid to hold compassionate but unpopular views. He would just have been afraid to say so out loud.
Susan Carter, the manager of the village shop, emerges from the stockroom to tell Rob that his kind isn’t welcome in Ambridge.
“Yeah, fuck off, Rob!” the man’s wife shouts.
“Really?” the man says, from his bath.
“What, are you feeling sorry for Rob now?” the wife says.
“No,” the man says. “But I’m not sure that sort of vindictiveness helps anyone.”
“Go, Susan!” the wife says.
“It demeans the entire community,” the man says.
“Quiet,” the wife says.
“And anyway,” the man says, “this is the third time we’ve heard this exact same bit in a week.”
“Never too many!” the wife says.
Lying back in the bath, the man stares at the ceiling and realises that he does live in turbulent times – times riven by factionalism, when it could be considered dangerous to air compassionate but unpopular views. The coming year, he thinks, will bring many challenges that will not be solved by the sort of people who finish one biography every eight weeks. It will require people who can speak out with courage and without fear of reprisal or ridicule. Mentally he scrolls right along a spreadsheet of resolutions until he gets to “Learn Italian”. Curtain.
