I Believe In Yesterday: My Living Hell in Living History - Softcover

Moore, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224077813 ISBN 13: 9780224077811

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2008

Synopsis

An odyssey through 2,000 years of filth and fury, where men were men, the nights were black, the world was your outside toilet and everything tasted faintly of leeks.

In 1989, Tim Moore moved into the last house in Chiswick with an outside toilet. Intrigued by a subsequent encounter with an elderly former resident, and shamed to confess the phobic haste with which he demolished this facility, he finds himself inspired to travel back to the land before now, experiencing the horny-handed hardships and homespun pleasures enjoyed and endured by Moores gone by.

The journey that follows takes him through the world of historical re-enactment, sitting at the bare and grubby feet of retromaniacs who have seen their future in the past, and learning their singular ways. Living on bramble leaves, Johnny cake and porridge, Moore travels from the Iron Age to the Steam Age. He shares straw beds and daft hats with period obsessives driven by socio-historical curiosity, disillusionment with the pampered fecklessness of the modern world, or a simple nostalgia for campfires, flatulence and brutality.

Along the way he meets living historians for whom authenticity means pulling their own teeth out and dyeing outfits in urine, and those who stride back through time with a Nokia and a packet of fags stuffed down their codpiece.

About this title

About the Author:

Tim Moore writes for the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Financial Times and Esquire. He lives quietly in London, entertaining family with recitations of the critical praise lavished on his first book, Frost on My Moustache.

Review:

"The world's funniest travel writer" * Observer * "Moore has never been afraid to suffer for his art. In pursuit of comic travelogue gold, he's followed in the footsteps of a nineteenth-century explorer; driven, silver-suited, across Europe in a temperamental Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow; cycled the 3,500km-plus route of the Tour de France; and made a pilgrimage to Santiago accompanied only by a donkey. But none of this compares to what he endured for this superbly funny new book" * Time Out * "One of our most amiable writers" * The Times * "His funniest book... Possibly the best book ever completed by a man covered in congealed animal fat, sweat and canon smoke" * Independent * "Moore is a talented and very funny writer" * Daily Telegraph *

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0224077813
• ISBN 13: 9780224077811
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320