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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| History And All That A few thoughts occurred when I read the prompts for Express It In Eight this morning. I find it impossible to write an 8-line poem since I have too much to say on the subject. In the hope that, if I get these things out into the world, I might be able to write a few verses, this follows: Historians hate it when someone at the back of the class stands up and says, “ Hold on a moment. I was there and that is not how it happened at all.” That is why history starts when living memory has just about died out. When I was at school, back in the fifties and sixties, history stopped at the First World War (known then as the Great War, mainly because it wasn’t). As I have grown older, I have learned that the Second World War is now on the curriculum and, for all I know, the Korean War has joined it. This is quite natural and how things are meant to be. History is all about the past and should not be something that I remember. I find it disturbing when people talk about something as history when its memory is still as clear as yesterday in my head. Buddy Holly and the Crickets recording That’ll Be the Day is not history. Neither is Muhammad Ali winning his first heavyweight title nor is Lawrence Welk’s last television show. These are memories and I can still stand up in the back row and shout, for instance, “No, he didn’t. His name at the time was Cassius Clay and I watched the fight on TV. There was no Muhammad Ali back then.” History is different. No one can ever argue me out of my memories but, with the right references and documentary evidence, I can be persuaded to change my view on history. That is important to me since my main period of interest in English history is from 450AD to 1066AD. There are new finds every day in that area that have forced us to re-evaluate our thoughts completely. If we take it that I was not hugely interested in world events before the age of about ten, anything that happened after 1958 cannot possibly be history. It’s mine and you mess with it at your peril. Word count: 385 |
| Facebook Reflections Facebook is a terrible thing if you're happy with your life as it is. The moment you open an account with FB, you're putting yourself right out there where you can be spotted by old friends, acquaintances and ex-colleagues from former workplaces. For those of us who can only take a certain amount of social interaction, the avalanche of "blasts from the past" is likely to be more than we didn't ask for. it's not that we have changed our minds or feelings about people from long ago. In fact, it's more about wanting to keep things as they were. A lot can happen in ten years or more and we will have moved on. The likelihood is that they will have changed too. How much better it is to retain the memory of them as they were, to preserve them as young, hale and hearty. What possible good can come of two cranky old fogies pretending that nothing has changed and they're still the utter fools they were back then? My early years on FB were spent largely in ducking friend requests from people I once knew. It took only a few experiences of that first rush of enthusiasm followed by the realisation that I had nothing to talk about with the long-lost one for me to become expert in hiding in plain view. The clear but terrible truth is that those new and virtual friends you've made because you play the same FB game or have commented on one of their posts are your real friends now. You have more in common with them and they change with you as you change with them. Those in the past stay in the past where they can be ageless, invincible and steadfast to whatever they believed in then. I am immensely proud, however, that I have one friend from long ago that I correspond with fairly regularly. Thanks to this, I can claim to be reasonably human and not totally antisocial. But I've learned my lesson about trying to contact old friends. Don't do it, buddy - let them live forever in your memory. Word count: 355 |
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I've always remembered that episode and thought that was a fun idea.
Quite good is quite a good compliment 
As someone who just reviewed an item in your port, I can't help but wonder, Did I pick an item that you'd throw out? 