One Day Ian Marchant, noted for his books on music, railways, pubs decided to dig around his family history, and stumbled on his seven-times-great great-grandfather, Thomas Marchant had left a detailed diary from 1714 to 1728.

Thomas who like a drink and a game of cards  gave fascinating and immersive detail about his family farm and fishponds; about dung, horses and mud; about beer, the wife’s nights out, his own job troubles and their shared worries for their children.

Ian focuses on the diarist, a Sussex  Yeoman born in 1676 and discovers beyond the Sussex diary’s bucolic portrait, a subtext – a family descended from immigrants, with anti- establishment politics, who are struggling with illness, political instability and crash crises – just as their country does three centuries on.

“When I was reflecting late on January evening on the differences between Thom and me, I realised the unbridgeable thing that comes between us is industrialisation. He lived right at its beginning, while I am living somewhere toward its end. Old  Thom Marchant was one of the last people before industrialisation to understand how his world worked- and how to be largely self-sufficient in it. He knew where his food cam from, his fuel, his water, his clothes. He knew how the welfare looked after the roads, too. He collected taxes, He was not separate from the system, but part of it”.

Ian throw light into Marchant family life in the 1720s and how their England (rainy, muddy, politically turbulent, illness-ridden) became the England of the 2020s.

The entry “ Paid John Gatland of Cuckfield 5s for mending my clock” sends Marchant  to dig deeper in horological history to discover how would an Englishman in the early 18^th century have understood time? Is the clock single handed, pendulous, is the clock in half quarter-hours, seven and a half-minute increments?

Another entry in the diary pertain to dung-carrying, firewood-bundling and account-settling – but its functions as a starting point for comparisons between past and present, which Marchant calls “Whimsical psycho-topography”.

Marchant concludes: “ Families are too complicated just to be expressed in a family tree.”

“All of the men on the family tree that my wife sent me are dead, except for one”. That last man standing is Ian Marchant, who traces 15^th– century Belgium, and that somewhere along the way great- grandfather number  seven was a diarist.  In 2020, Marchant learns that he has prostrate cancer – “ no the good kind that you die with, but the bad kind that you probably die of. So amid pandemic, he drops everything and heads off to Belgium to find his ancestral home.

Marchant says “ Shit postponed is the same as no shit at all” and informs his interest in everything from Argentine narrow-gauge railways to medieval Belgium iron works.

One Fine Day: A journey Through English Time by Ian Marchant, September Publishing £20, 352 pages.