Comme tous les jours, David part à l'EHPAD où il travaille. Il lave, habille, accompagne et prend soin des résidents dans leur quotidien. Jusqu'à ce qu'un appel de la gendarmerie vienne tout chambouler : sa mère a été retrouvée morte, seule, dans son appartement. David prend sa voiture pour se rendre chez elle, et se remémore les moments passés ensemble, les doux comme les plus violents. Commence le travail de deuil et le début de situations burlesques entre les obsèques et la gestion de sa sour handicapée mentale. Dans ce contexte lourd et pesant défile une avalanche d'événements tous plus absurdes, invraisemblables et cocasses les uns que les autres. À travers ce témoignage, David Hall aborde avec justesse et un humour piquant la perte d'un parent, et les difficultés de l'après.

Les Vertiges des sentiments

In the late 1930s the Lancashire town of Bolton witnessed a ground-breaking social experiment. Over three years, a team of ninety observers recorded, in painstaking detail, the everyday lives of ordinary working people at work and play - in the pub, dance hall, factory and on holiday. Their aim was to create an 'anthropology of ourselves'. The first of its kind, it later grew into the Mass Observation movement that proved so crucial to our understanding of public opinion in future generations.
The project attracted a cast of larger-than-life characters, not least its founders, the charismatic and unconventional anthropologist Tom Harrisson and the surrealist intellectuals Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings. They were joined by a disparate band of men and women - students, artists, writers and photographers, unemployed workers and local volunteers - who worked tirelessly to turn the idle pleasure of people-watching into a science.
Drawing on their vivid reports, photographs and first-hand sources, David Hall relates the extraordinary story of this eccentric, short-lived, but hugely influential project. Along the way, he creates a richly detailed, fascinating portrait of a lost chapter of British social history, and of the life of an industrial northern town before the world changed for ever.

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