Things happen on everyday of the year, if you think about it. I mean, there are so many millions of things happening to so many millions of people, that there’s bound to be a list of events from everyday in history that got into newspapers, happened to someone famous, or were historically, politically, culturally or socially important somehow. Plus any kind of finite list, not just a list of important things that happened on a given day, excludes much more than it includes: and those exclusions will be both biased and subjective. Not necessarily in a bad way. I’m just saying. OK, so that’s a huge caveat to what I’m writing about here.
I’ve known about 11th February for a while. I wanted a poem to read with some of my students. I needed to get it up on a screen in class. I had about half an hour. So it had to be online. It happened to be 11th February. I googled and found the poem by Paul Farley of the same name on the Guardian website. So the poem talks about how, while The Beatles recorded their first album, Sylvia Plath killed herself. Both in North London. I didn’t find out until a few weeks ago that Lizzie Siddal also killed herself on 11th February, in 1862, also in London. (Lizzie Siddal was a poet I wrote about in an essay published last year.)
So I looked into it a bit more. Here’s the 11th Feb list so far. Henry VIII became head of the Church of England; Lizzie Siddal killed herself; Sylvia Plath killed herself; The Beatles recorded their first album; Thatcher got herself elected leader of conservatives; Mandela walked free, and now the Pope resigns…
I just reread Freakonomics and now I’m reading Superfreakonomics. I’m also a fan of Malcolm Gladwell. I like reading nonfiction in the freakonomics genre, basically witty, intelligent writing that finds connections in the seemingly everyday. By the way, I recommend another book in a similar vein called Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks. Now I think that the freakonomics guys do smooth over some pretty hefty assumption-making regarding the data they are interpreting. But that doesn’t stop it from being entertaining. And seeing as I’m reading Superfreakonomics, it’s made me think of the 11th February phenomenon in a new way. Namely, in terms of number-crunching the hidden aspects of a thing. 11th February is seven weeks after Christmas. It’s just a possibility that all of those things happened on 11th February for the same reason: it takes around six or seven weeks to organise anything of any significance.