Tom Holland: I like to think I’m a fighter, not a quitter

“Ring out the old, ring in the new…” This was the year I discovered that one of my ancestors had been a housemaid deflowered, impregnated and turfed out on to the street by her self-evidently villainous employer — but also that another had been land agent to Lord Tennyson. The perfect incentive for me, then, this festive season, to curl up with “In Memoriam A.H.H.” The poem’s tone of plangent melancholy, its regret that the years must slip by, will be more than usually in tune with my mood: for in 2025, a mere five days after new year, I shall be marking my fifty-seventh birthday. There is, as Tennyson well knew, a kind of pleasure in being lugubrious. The older I get, the more I am looking to embrace it.

I do not intend, however, merely to surrender to my consciousness of aging. I am, I like to think, a fighter, not a quitter. Last winter, I was stalked in my dreams by a recurring nightmare. Again and again, I would imagine myself on a cricket pitch, running up to bowl. In one dream I would be trapped in sinking sand; in another, holding a shuttlecock or a powderpuff; in another, rather than hitting the stumps with the ball, I would knock out the square-leg umpire. Clearly, then, my subconscious was telling me to go to a gym: something I had never done, nor ever imagined that I would do. The dreams, however, would not be denied. I duly steeled myself; ventured into what seemed a kind of torture chamber, full of glinting machines, glistening muscles and cheery, terrifying slogans — and prepared to be humiliated. But I wasn’t. Fate had paired me with the best personal trainer imaginable: a Bulgarian prepared not only to keep a straight face as I struggled with a dumbbell, but also to undertake an intensive program of research into the exercises required to play cricket. The results have been stupefying. This summer, far from retiring, I took my first catch for ten years, muscled my way to a score of twenty-one off thirteen balls, and even managed to throw a ball in from the boundary. Not only that but Simon, my incomparably wonderful trainer, is now the best cricket coach in the entire history of Bulgaria. So aging — it’s not all bad.

My new-found enthusiasm for elite sports training might be characterized, I suppose, as a rage against the dying of the light; but in other ways I have been embracing my senescence. Acting one’s age, I have found, is much easier with a role model to hand; and this year I have found a perfect one in the form of Sir Edward Grey, the 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon. It was he who served as foreign secretary during the build up to the first world war, and famously lamented, on the evening of August 3, 1914, that the lamps were going out all over Europe. His great passion, however, was not geopolitics but fishing, and it is hard to believe that any man in history has looked better in a tweed fishing hat than Sir Edward. Standing beside — or even worse, in — a river, trying to do unpleasant things to a fish, had always seemed to me the maddest pastime; but reading him on fishing, and noting how tremendously cool he looked in a tweed suit, has inspired me to follow in his sporting footsteps. This year, I have caught a trout; I have caught a salmon; and I have bought myself a perfect replica of Sir Edward’s hat from Lock & Co.

The discovery of a new style icon is one of the many incidental benefits I have enjoyed from doing a podcast, The Rest Is History, with my friend Dominic Sandbrook. The build-up to World War One was a lengthy — but by no means the longest — series we did this year: a staging-post in what has constituted for both of us an entire program of self-education. It has also provided us with an unexpected entrée into showbusiness: for there is enthusiasm, it turns out, for listening to two middle-aged men drone on about capital punishment in Tudor England, or changing patterns of patronage in late eighteenth-century Europe. Maddest of all, I can boast of having sung in some of the most famous venues in the world. This autumn alone I found myself performing a Mozart aria in the Royal Albert Hall and the Beatles on Broadway. Anyone who would like to know just how improbable an achievement that is should check out our episode on Evita, in which I sing — or rather “sing” — “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” Who knows, then, what 2025 may bring? As Tennyson once put it: “Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes/ But ring the fuller minstrel in.”