As I arrived home yesterday evening I glanced at my Twitter feed and read something that stopped me in my tracks.
“January 16 1912…” it read. “the worst has happened”
I scrolled frantically up for new tweets. “What?” “What has happened??”
For months I’d been following @CaptainRFScott’s ‘live’ tweets – excerpts written a hundred years ago in the journals of Captain Scott on his final expedition.
At 6am I’d looked bleary-eyed at my phone to read “We should start one hour later tomorrow i.e. at 4 AM”
After what I’d thought was a pretty chilly bike commute I’d read “We awoke this morning to raging, howling blizzard”
And brushing my teeth before bed I’d learned solemnly “We kill another pony tomorrow night”
@CaptainRFScott in my Twitter feed
Scott started to come to life because he was in my life: there, on my screen, the kitchen table, in my rucksack. His story started happening not a century ago, but now. Why? Because it was happening now – it said so: “tweeted 43s ago”.
I wasn’t reading the diaries of a dead, mythologised hero but hearing a man’s voice shouting over the wind in the desolate whiteness of the Antarctic plateau. I’d eaten with the polar party (“plum pudding, then cocoa with raisins and finally a dessert of caramels and ginger”). I’d marched with them.
So yesterday evening I wasn’t standing in a doorway in SW2 in 2012. I was at 90 degrees south in 1912 and it was minus 23.5. And this guy turns to me and he says “The worse has happened”.
I already knew the story of the 1910–1913 expedition. I’d read the biographies. I’d read a good chunk of the journals. I knew Scott’s party had endured years of freezing, brutal hardship in pursuit of a goal, found out that someone got there first, and then watched each other and themselves die. But it was only at that moment that I felt – for a fleeting moment – a tiny fraction what that might actually feel like.
So how did he do it?
It wasn’t the story itself – that was the same: a dream, a stuggle, glorious failure.
It wasn’t how he told it: a sequence of pieces of information with every successive one significant for what comes next.
It was where he told it, and when. @CaptainRFScott told it here — in the palm of your hand — and he told it now.
What that meant is he could do the thing that all good stories do. He made you care deeply about what happened, and the results were heart-stopping.
