Live Long and Prosper - wherever you are

Today I did consider the Orlando mass shooting as a blog subject but whichever way I attempted to approach this awful event, I felt unqualified to write about it.  Suffice to say, it was, and is, horrible seeing the details unfold and I send condolences to all.

 

Instead then, this weekend I finished reading The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell.  I am very late to this book - it won the Costa prize in 2010 - but since Maggie O'Farrell's seventh novel, This Must Be The Place, has just been released to very good reviews, I thought I should read some of her earlier work, in an attempt to look at her progression as a novelist (now doesn't that sounds grown up?!) when I read the new book.

 

I was not prepared for the effect The Hand That First Held Mine had on me.  I gather from a recent profile in Writing magazine that Ms O'Farrell does have young children but her writing about the immediate aftermath of bringing a baby home touched me very deeply.  One of the main characters has had an emergency caesarean section and is completely disorientated once at home alone with the baby.  I found it very very poignant.  In fact, as I was reading some passages, I felt as if I was once again standing in the dark hallway of the house to which we brought our eldest home.  So sleepless I was basically hallucinating.  No idea what I was doing but very aware of having to keep another human being alive (my only previous 'live responsibility' having been a hamster).  It was like the author had delved into my head and taken my deepest, darkest thoughts.  I remember, for example, being obsessed with hearing one of the emergency surgeons referring to it being the end of their shift while they were sewing me up.  I became convinced I had been 'deprived' of a natural birth because they were in a hurry.  Not because they were saving my child's life obviously.

 

What kept me going through those confusing months was friends, a plethora of 'what to do with babies' books and the then fledgling internet resources like Mumsnet.  I am still close to some of the friends I made as I dragged my hugely pregnant and then just completely knackered self around our new home city.  Looking back, Eldest was actually not that difficult a baby either...

 

And how on earth did women manage before NCT groups, playgroups, self-help books, Mumsnet, etc.  As children, my brother and I used to laugh at my mother's reliance on her Dr Spock for diagnosing illnesses.  Now I can see that there was very little else available.  She did not live round the corner from either of our grandmothers and frankly, I am not sure what use they would have been anyway.  We had a neighbour who actually saved my brother' life when he had convulsions.  She also had older children so had been there, done that.  But it was not exactly a meeting of minds for my mother, to say the least.

 

Parenting is the hardest job I have ever, without question, done.  I have worked with politicians, TV people, investment bankers, all sorts.  But I am into my thirteenth year of parenting now and although it changes constantly, it does not get easier.  Yes, I am now one of those who looks at a new baby and hands it back saying 'just you wait, this is the easy part'.

 

However, in countries like the UK, when we look back over our family history, we can see, mostly, the progressions in ante- and post-natal health.  In contraception.  In life expectancy.  There are still far too many countries in the world, though, where parenting of the type I have attempted to describe is a complete luxury.  Daily survival, hand-to-mouth, is the priority in these places.  If your child is lucky enough to survive to its teens, you will have been expecting them to have been paying their own way for a long time.

 

Of course, poverty, neglect etc can be found everywhere in the world.  But as I read The Hand That First Held Mine and was transported back to my own personal battles - which still continue as far as depression is concerned - I wondered how so many parents but women especially manage to keep mind and body together in physical circumstances far beyond our imagining.  From war zones and refugees to drug addictions and slavery to 'just' lack of what we consider basic resources.  They are all amazing.  And they deserve our help.

 

[If you would like to help with such issues, my suggested charity would be http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what-we-do/issues-we-work-on but there are many others if you google.]

Making a Date

 

 

This weekend has been quite a contrast to the last.  Last weekend we were dealing with the first anniversary of my father-in-law's death.  This weekend, we had a welcome happy event.  A belated party for my mother's seventieth birthday.  It was a lovely evening.  Fourteen of us at a gorgeous Italian restaurant.  Three generations - in-laws, step-relations, grandchildren, children, siblings.  So many relationships amongst the group.

And as we travelled home, nursing a bit of a hangover I must admit (praise the Lord for Diet Coke), I thought about how little time my children have spent with my aunts, uncles and cousins.  My mother is one of four.  Three sisters and a brother.  I am one of ten cousins.  We live all over the country and since the death of my grandmother twelve years ago, I don't think we have managed a date where every single person has made it along.

But my children really enjoyed meeting my aunts and uncles at the dinner party.  My daughter was particularly interested in meeting my mother's elder sister and her husband as they had memories of being children during the second world war.  This was a topic of hers last year and she has not lost her enthusiasm for information about it.  Her own grandparents were either too young or in Ireland and did not have a great deal to share with her.  So once she had got over her (pretend!) shyness, there was a lot of chatter.

So my 2016 resolution - typically a month late - is to organise a happy get-together for my mother's family.  My granddad died at seventy one.  My aunt was saying last night that she was sure he would have lived longer if he had gone to a doctor years earlier.  He should have had, at the least, drugs to deal with hardened arteries but most probably a heart bypass.  I have no fear that his children will not visit doctors but their ages are now in the seventies.

And this, combined with January's list of celebrities who have died at similar ages, brings it home that we should spend more time together.  Just for the hell of it rather than because something awful has happened.  There also needs to be a major exchange of information.  I have previously whittered on in blog posts about making sure that you pump all available aged relations for family history snippets before it is too late.  Well, I will be organising a lovely get together. But with questionnaires to fill in as you enter and no exit until you have completed it...

 

PS  you can still vote for my first creative writing piece at www.kishboo.co.uk

Valid History

 

 

Last night, on Simon Mayo's Drivetime, it was Book Club night and the book being discussed sounded really fascinating.  The Truth According To Us by Annie Barrows is set in small town America in the Depression era.  I cannot comment on the book as I have not yet read it.  [Although I have now added it to the ever growing list of "must read" along with many Sunday supplement clippings, the Woman & Home Reading Room recommendations, my own local book club and the research for my fledgling creative writing.  No pressure...]

 

One discussion concerned "what is history".  Apparently, the book deals with the writing of a small town's history and the struggle to make sense of past events in the light of age-old grudges and warped memories.  Annie Barrows agreed very much with a comment that history is "about who writes it".  Very dependent on how someone or some organisation or some nation wants to be remembered.  Ms Barrows said that history is just a construct, not factual at all, "just a bunch of stories".

 

And I feel this resonates with many of my blog subjects in the last year.  Family history is what we make of it in the present generation.  My blog about The Demon Drink is an example.  Posts on how disease actually affected a family would be another.

 

John Hurt spent the whole of his Who Do You Think You Are? episode firmly convinced that he somehow came from Irish aristocracy.  He had been told so many tales over his life time that he had even convinced himself of a natural affinity with the country.  It was not true.  But it had coloured his family's view of themselves for generations.

 

Last weekend, I was reading a BBC History magazine (I know - my life is just so exciting...).  One of the articles was a revisionist view of the War of the Roses.  The author believes, along with many others, that Tudor propaganda aimed at cementing that family's position was responsible for substantially altering views of the pre-Tudor period.  He said, though, that it was not just down to primitive propaganda.  It was due to Shakespeare wanting to excite audiences, it was down to thrilling tales passed down and exaggerated between generations, and so on.

 

Look at Wolf Hall.  Tudor history rewritten in the twenty first century.  Thomas Cromwell has been a well known historical villain, of sorts, for centuries.  Now, after Hilary Mantel has finished with him, we are all feeling rather sorry for him and desperate for him not to die in the (please finish it soon, Hilary!) last of the trilogy.  Even though the fact of his death is one of the few certainties of his story.

 

Winston Churchill said "History is written by the victors".  Did you ever hear of a world famous book or film about German POWs escaping?  And what about Hiroshima's sufferings? 

 

It is not just victors though.  It is perception.  It is feelings.  In this blog, I have tried to look at how certain facts may have made participants feel and/or influenced their decisions.  I agree with Annie Barrows' assessment of history to a degree.  But history is no less valid for taking account of prevailing feelings, fashions, fortunes and families.

The Demon Drink

 

 

In my last post, I referred to family issues affecting my writing.  One of the issues is alcoholism.  One of my husband's adopted brothers is sinking ever further into addiction and is simply unable to see that he needs help.  He believes he controls the alcohol, not the other way around.  His life, nearly fifty years of it, has not gone at all as he would have hoped and he has battled other addictions in the past.  However, the death of my father-in-law this year has tipped the balance and this is the worst that we have seen him - from any substance or liquid.

 

One of the issues which I wonder about, in my pondering, genealogy-obsessed way, is what has driven him to this point.  The circumstances of his adoption were not handled well by my parents-in-law.  A very old fashioned approach was taken to how the two brothers were told of their adoptions (they are not related to each other) and how the family then integrated when my husband, the only natural child, arrived.  My brother-in-law has always maintained no interest in seeking out his birth parents.  However, on Long Lost Family last week, one of the stories concerned a man who had sunk into addiction because of the rejection he felt from a combination of being adopted and of his adoptive parents then divorcing.  He described very eloquently how he had reacted and I believe my brother in law may have very similar issues.

 

Alcoholism can run in families.  I do not think a trace of the birth parents in this case would necessarily reveal alcohol related problems though.  I believe it is self esteem and family issues which have driven the constant need for a crutch in his life.

 

Now, though, we appear to have passed a point where counselling alone would help him to abandon his crutch.  Drying out is the only option but to do that, you have to recognise the existence of the problem and we are at a loss with how to make this happen.

 

I know, sadly, from having also witnessed a couple of acquaintances slip into alcoholism over the past ten years, that at a certain point, even organ failure and imminent death do not persuade someone that drink is not the answer.  They will lie, yellowing, on a hospital bed and ask you to slip them a drink.

 

Many of us like a drink, don't get me wrong.  This is drinking on a whole different scale.  Wake up, drink whiskey; once you are no longer capable of holding down a job you then drink on and off all day.  You lapse into sleep, wake up hungover at whatever time then start drinking again.  Continue ad infinitum...  Paula Hawkins' thriller The Girl On The Train describes the cycle very well.

 

We are lucky to have more knowledge than our ancestors on how to deal with these issues.  Despite government cuts, there are many services trying to help, to cope.  The Georgians, the Victorians or whoever did not have these insights.  However, at the end of the day in whatever age of history you are looking at, the key remains the same.  Admitting the problem and wanting to do something about it.  I hope my brother-in-law can find that key soon.

 

Just keep swimming

It has been far too long since I posted.  I apologise to my reader!  A combination of coursework PC issues and family issues has caused me to have even less time to think and write.  I am now writing on a borrowed laptop and some of the keys do not work so commas are impossible!

 

Anyway the last couple of weeks have been very difficult. As written about at the beginning of the year we recently lost my father in law.  Well the fall out is now starting to take its toll.  While dog walking in recent weeks a number of blog posts have rushed around my head.  Mostly they have related to coping with elderly relatives circle of life etc

 

My mother in law lives in Ireland still.  She is increasingly frail and confused but utterly refuses to consider any solution other than living in her own home.  Historically in Ireland the elders of a family did stay in their own homes.  Large families just accepted that in general their parents died at home looked after one of the siblings.  That sibling then took over the home and the land as theirs.  until relatively recently that has been the way.  Thus now that we are looking for solutions we are realising that very little is available other than full nursing care.  In the |UK my grandparents' generation were able to consider sheltered accommodation type places.  Their own flats but with help available and hot meals and social activities if they wanted them.  There is a distinct lack of such places in the part of Ireland where we need them.

 

But frankly hats off to the families who have dealt with their elders for generation after generation.  It is hard hard work.  And it must have been considerably harder in the days before any state help a health service and the general change in knowledge of dementia and other illnesses.  We are a fortnight into a stay and I am exhausted.

 

I am going to post this short piece so that anyone who actually reads my stuff regularly (thank you!) knows I haven't given up.  PC and commas back next week I hope....

Genetic Voting

 

 

So once again it is a while since I posted.  In the intervening period since my last missive, though, I have spent a lot of time answering questions from my children.  They are completely fascinated by the general election!  The only ones in the country who are not completely sick of the whole thing.  The idea that no one knows what will happen tomorrow or who will be in charge has totally caught their imagination.  I have answered questions on the 'first past the post' voting system, the unfairness of said system, the difference for proportional representation.  At the weekend it was questions about coalitions and who decides.  This morning we spent breakfast talking about who would be prime minister and why one should vote at all (a whole new subject!).  And what is the Queen's role (!)?  And 'does David Cameron even want to be prime minister again' [direct quote!]?

As mentioned in previous posts, I started my career in politics.  With a politics degree and a research post with a Labour MP.  I was, throughout my teens, a proper Millie Tant.  On some issues, I have definitely mellowed; on others, I have never faltered.

However, since my own children started with the questions, I have become very curious about the origins of political sensibilities.  My own parents were diametrically opposed.  My mother has never wavered in her relatively left wing principles.  My father becomes more of a walking Daily Mail the older he gets.

This morning, we had to explain to the children that we too - my husband and I - are on opposite sides of the fence.  [In fact, as we live in a Tory constituency, I was cursing the children for starting this off again.  I was hoping that my husband would forget to vote tomorrow - or my vote just won't count!]

Did my mother, as my father always claim, indoctrinate me for the Left?  Or was it simply that my father did not offer suitable arguments?  Was I genetically predisposed to sympathise with the Left?  My mother's family history of Left wing activity is very strong.  But then my memories of the Anglo Indian grandparents are all of Daily Telegraph reading, standing up for the national anthem, silence for the Queen's Speech at Christmas, disdain for socialist ideals.  They did not waver either.

 

Yet to me, some thing felt wrong about their views.  For one thing, I could not reconcile their innate racism with their skin colour.  The kind of ideas which I was brought up with for my mother's side just seemed so much fairer and more reasonable when I was a child.

 

I wonder how it was in the famous Miliband household?  Or the Kinnocks - their son is running for elections in Wales tomorrow?  If both parents believe the same thing, you must get an extra push!

 

Today, all we could do was to smile when the children asked how we will vote and why.  I had a rant prepared but my husband cut me off by saying that reasons are quite private!  I wait with interest to see which side my children will eventually fall on but I have a sneaky hope that my Left genes have done their work.

 

 

 

 

 

Playing Out

 

Today, while being walked by the dog (!), I passed through one of those pieces of rough ground that you sometimes come across in towns and villages.  At the end of a road or on a piece of land in between the houses of an estate.  Just waiting for someone to squash in more homes.

I suddenly remembered that as a child, I spent a whole summer basically living on such a site.  That's to say, my parents knew where I was and I did return for meals/sleep but the rest of the time was spent working on the den I built with friends.  We made a hollow inside a group of tall bushes in one corner of this waste ground, dragging all manner of rubbish from around the site with which to "furnish" and "arm" the camp.  For it was a working military base - we were on a permanent war footing with a neighbouring den.  We had look-out rotas, a fleet of bikes and a couple of siblings employed as spies.  We started as early as we were allowed out, stayed all day and on nice evenings, went back after tea too.

It was surrounded by the back fences of gardens (not mine) but developers had not filled in this particular blank space yet.  Like the land I saw today, it had become a bit of dumping ground but with a bit of tlc, could have been a real asset to the community.  However. within a year or so of that summer, builders had found a way to get vehicle access through and building began.  One of my fellow fighters even found herself living there after her parents upgraded to one of the new houses.

I did think as I looked around today that I had really quite a lot of freedom while at middle school.  Far more than my children.  I don't recall any of our parents ever coming down to see where we were.  We said we were going to that place, we were trusted to stay there.  And no one seemed to think we would come to any harm.  Just went home when we had had enough, filthy but happy.

The endless debate goes on, doesn't it?  Are there more child snatchers these days?  Were we too slack with children's whereabouts in the past?  Have mobile phones made a difference?  Do children just not want to leave their screens and play such games these days?  I really do not have any answers and this is not a parenting blog.  However, as regular readers will know, I do like to ponder on how things were different for the generations before me.

My mother grew up in a tiny village.  She has memories of wandering all over and often being brought back to the house by neighbours.  In one famous family anecdote, she and her younger siblings decided to paddle in the fresh cowpats they found.  All very amusing but looking back now, she says my grandmother clearly was not coping with four children, the younger three all being under four at the same time.  Grandma simply did not know where they were.

My father spent toddlerdom in India and there are photos of him with his ayah (nanny), on bikes and on the beach.  Quite a privileged upbringing in some ways.  But when they fled from India, his sun filled memories of India were exchanged for dull and endless factory terraces in Coventry.  His first coat and boots.  Playing football in the street and against the yard wall.  Watching the horse drawn milk cart arrive.  I think he did have quite a bit of freedom though.  My grandmother was occupied with a new baby once my father turned six and I do know that by fourteen or so, he was off on European train trips with the Scouts.  Unsupervised.  Given clues to meet their leader somewhere!

Their parents had different upbringings again of course.  Some rural - playing out all the time, some restricted and sent early on to boarding school.  One in very poor city circumstances, leaving school at thirteen or fourteen.  How much freedom did they have while living at home?  Maybe they had more freedom but at the same time had less choices.  My Anglo Indian ancestors' choices were all limited by their mixed race status.  Many of my English ancestors must have been limited by poverty.  Freedom to play out is harder to use if you are a drudge at home or in a mill or factory.

Playing out is the new staying in.  My motto for the summer.  But call me when you get there, darling.  I don't want to be a 1970s parent!

 

How very on trend

Last night I was watching BBC2's Back In Time For Dinner.  I have not managed to see all episodes but the basic premise is one of those "send a family time travelling" programmes.  How will they get on living in the Second World War/as Edwardians/etc...

Anyway, this series has been looking at the changes to food fashions/availability and family eating habits.  So the family concerned have "lived in" every decade from the Fifties to the Nineties.  It has been an interesting experiment and quite eye opening to see how things have changed in many ways.

But last night, I watched the Nineties episode in despair.  Not at the quality of the programme or anything.  Just at what a predictable life I seem to have had.  Each show, they have re-done the house's kitchen appropriately for the decade.  Well, last night they could have been standing in the first kitchen which I ever properly owned.  It looked identical, even the door handles!  And as for the music, their clothes, the dinner party food fashions, let's just say someone had been watching my life in the Nineties and decided to recreate it for television.

Yes, it is funny but it is also disturbing in some ways.  Most of us like to think of ourselves as distinctive in our choices.  You think you have maybe given the nod to a trend in home décor or in cooking but you don't like to think that you are wholly immersed in/influenced by your times.  You want to feel creative and unique.  [Strangely, for the Seventies, I had just laughed and reminisced - I guess because the ghastly choices were not made by me - they just seemed nostalgic!  Maybe my mother would cringe though.]

Yet once you look back at a period of time, you can see how sheep-like we all really are!  Obviously those programme makers did not use just my life.  My life in the Nineties was just, unbeknownst to me, completely mired in the trends of the times.  I had wholeheartedly embraced the Nineties apparently.

Sadly this means that my current almost brand new kitchen living room will one day probably be looked at by someone as "typical early twenty first century open plan living".  They will question how we ever thought we could live like this, who would have a cooker like that, etc etc.  By then, who knows, they may all be living on Willy Wonka style meal chewing gum or something!

It would be curious to know if our nineteenth century and earlier ancestors would have similar feelings if we were able to show them footage relating to their own early days.  That is to say, Victorians did not call themselves "Victorians" or Georgians use the term "Georgians".  Is this defining of a period's trends new or would someone in 1890 be despairing at the cliché of an 1870 kitchen or living room décor?!  There were huge innovations during the nineteenth century.  I am not sure that an average person would be able to pinpoint a particular decade from its style though.  Maybe an aristocratic person could but I think the rising consumerism of post war combined with wealthy middle classes, mass media and so on has caused our lives to be much more trend-led.  More so even than we realise, clearly...

Family Values

 

I am just at the end of ten days in Florida.  It has been quite something.  As regular readers will know, we recently lost my father in law and we were unsure until two days before as to whether we would make it to the US.  However, as a family bonding exercise it has been amazing.  We have queued, gasped, screamed and laughed as a family.  We are very lucky.

And something which has struck me in every park, but particularly the Disney parks, has been the very strong sense of family shown by the American families.  A Florida visit seems to be a rite of passage which is used at all stages of life and by all strata of society.  The first visit in your stroller, the first visit when you are tall enough for all the rides, the spring break visit with your college friends, the visits as a parent yourself and finally the visit as a grandparent sitting on a motor scooter but still loving it.  My husband and I do not have large immediate families.  Complicated but not large. So huge group family holidays are somewhat out of our experience. We do have friends though who all return to the same holiday camps or hotels en mass year on year and they get a lot out of those times.

However, Florida and especially Disney offers something different.  It offers a kind of history and heritage.  People collect pin badges each year and attach then to their pass holders like badges of honour.  They look forward to seeing the same rides which have been there since their own childhoods (I think some date from the ark!) whilst also expecting new and cutting edge stuff for their children. They want to do the "I remember when" thing with their grandchildren or the "remember when" with college buddies on reunion trips.  And don't get me started on the tradition of matching family trip t-shirts!  You can have them ready and waiting at your hotel...  This was actually the most un British aspect of the whole thing.  Drawing attention to yourselves!

All in all, this aspect of Orlando has been very educational as a family.  Today, we were queuing for the biggest ride of the year - Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts at Universal.   We queued for ninety minutes and we were closely followed by a three generation group who were pushing a very elderly guy in a wheelchair.  Having read the warnings about the ride, we were privately concerned at his being included but hey, not our business.  And do you know?  He was wheeled right to the train, marvelling like the rest of us at the pre-ride settings.  He was helped onto the ride and he had a blast just like we all did.  He sat with his son and his grandchildren and he loved it.  Another thing which we noticed actually - the provision for those with disabilities or need for assistance was outstanding.  Every theme or water park had help for nearly every ride.  It was very inclusive on all levels - age, ability, etc.

Not so much a post about family history as the importance of family today but I hope still worthy of consideration.  If you do go to Orlando though, just beware of the road system... It will stretch marriages to divorce... a whole new chapter of family history in the making! We were on the verge of counselling after getting lost for the fourth day in  row...

Articles of Interest

I am away at present and will not be posting as regularly as usual for a few days but in The Guardian on Saturday 28 March, there were two pieces relating to family history subjects which I would definitely recommend reading if you can find them on the website.  I show the links below but if they do not work, do search on the website using the writers' names.

I Turned My Great Grandfather Gay - Patrick Gale

I Found My Birth Mother Through the Newspaper Small Ads - Catherine Chanter

Incidentally, I would highly recommend the free Guardian app.  You get the full paper as far as I can tell, as well as updates on stories.

The State of the Union

Today is the climax to the Six Nations Rugby Championship of course and I find myself a rugby widow for the day.  To be fair, this is a rare event.  It takes quite some important rugby event to persuade my husband to change his football habits.  [The lure of beer all day definitely helped his decision, I believe.]

 

However, when he does switch, he always supports Ireland.  He was born in the UK but, as whittered about in previous posts, he has Irish parents.  He will support England ahead of the others in a championship though if Ireland are not in the running.  There is a table of precedence, you understand...

 

And as I listened to the coverage on Chris Evans' Radio 2 show yesterday on the various points combinations needed to establish a winner today, I did wonder how these competitions work in other families.  In my family alone, I have an Anglo-Indian father who supports England with every fibre, a Scottish stepfather and a Scottish sister in law who are both highly patriotic but also mad keen Celtic fans for the football which links to their Catholic heritage.  This is a loyalty shared by my Irish Catholic husband.  He supports Middlesbrough as well, for his sins.  Are you keeping up with this? 

 

My nephew was born in England but, at three, for the sake of diplomacy, has to be dressed alternately in Scottish and England outfits in order to keep all grandparents happy.  His Scottish grandfather, my brother's father in law, is as Scottish as they make them for sporting loyalties.  Yet he voted against Scottish independence.  My brother continually treads a fine line of popularity with his in-laws due to his Englishness.  My step sister of course has a Scottish father but has an English mother.  I really must ask her where her loyalties lie on these occasions! 

 

And the thing is, I don't think we are that unusual these days.  A good friend has set off for Murrayfield today with her seven year old.  She is Scottish through and through but her son remembers only England.  And her husband is Northern Irish...  I could give many other examples.

 

The first rugby international took place in 1871 between Scotland (see picture above) and England.  And presumably, in ordinary families, this was an event only mentioned in the newspapers.  Not something to be thinking about and cheering or arguing about. 

 

It took around a hundred years, with the advent of the 1970s television coverage, for the Six Nations to gain huge popularity, although as far as I can work out, some matches were televised from as early as 1948 - whether rugby league or union.  As a child of the 1970s with a rugby mad father, I have vivid memories of him settling himself down for a good old shout at the TV, be it for the Six Nations or England v New Zealand All Blacks or whatever.

 

As our families have fractured with the increase in geographical and social mobility over the last 150 years, maybe the improvement in communications has allowed us to reinforce our sense of belonging to something wider via sporting loyalty.  (For rugby at least, it seems quite good natured.  I may be wrong.)  We can feel part of a wider picture, wherever we are in the world.  As for me, I do support England - it is what I was brought up on.  However, for the sake of Anglo Irish peace in our house, I will refrain from any match analysis, whatever the result today!

 

Timing is Everything

 

This week I have met with two old friends, for dinner or for walking.  But our conversations have been remarkably similar.  It appears that my generation are reaching the sandwich time so often spoken of in magazines and Sunday supplements.

 

We had our children later, although not as late as many these days.  We have elderly parents and other relatives who are ailing or worse.  And we are trying to hold together households which are increasingly chaotic with work and child arrangements/activities.  To say nothing of the social lives of the family, the pressure to help with community stuff and the maintenance of gardens and property.

 

Our time is at a premium.  But this is the one thing which we cannot increase or reinvent.  Since, say, a hundred years ago, most human lives in the West have changed beyond recognition.  Labour saving devices, phones, internet, transport and travel, the homes we live in, the list is literally endless.

 

One of my favourite sets of books is about a Napoleonic British spy called Roger Brook.  The author, Dennis Wheatley, was unbelievably skilful at weaving Roger into historical events.  (Even now, I sometimes have to remind myself, when reading history from that period, that certain  events were not actually brought about with the help of Roger Brook, the character was so believable.)

 

However, an element of the books which has always struck me is the amount of time it takes for Roger to do anything.  Be it travel or post or getting clothes made or whatever, his time is so much more stretched than ours.  In order to prevent himself from being unmasked, in one book he rides flat out for three or four days from Moscow to Paris.  Three or four days!  And that was a mad feat of horsemanship to save his own neck - it should have taken over a week.  In another, he takes months to sail from England to the Caribbean.  His dispatches take weeks to get to his masters.

 

Would our modern mindsets cope if we had to return to these times?  We think we are time poor these days.  Imagine if we had to allow days at a time for a business journey.  Jolting along in a carriage, twiddling our thumbs.  No phones or laptops to amuse us or allow us to work.

 

Progress is great but maybe we should value time a bit more.  Instead of wishing for more hours in the day, I for one need to get better at doing what is important.  None of us know truly how much time we have.

 

 

Pinky Glee

Tomorrow is Mothers Day.  When I was a child, this day was mainly about a card for my mother, made at school or at Brownies and a silver foil wrapped bunch of daffodils given during the church service for me to pass, with clammy hands, down the pew to my mother.

 

Today, nearly forty years later, I entered a supermarket and was confronted with a full commercial "buy this stuff now or it is landfill tomorrow" sales push.  Never seen so many pink and yellow chrysanthemum bouquets, so much cheap pink champagne.  It was literally a bank of pastel, blocking entry to the main shopping area.  In John Lewis yesterday, they were pushing the slogan "make her day special" or some similar thing - and most of the posters seemed to be grouped around sickly coloured sewing accessories and slippers.  Next was pushing slogan-laden homewares - all in pastel colours.

 

How did this happen?  I do not in any way object to the sentiment behind Mothers Day.  But since when did it become pastel and 1950s style?  I do wonder what our near ancestors would make of it.  All the women who pushed for the vote, for job opportunities, for equal education.  They could be forgiven for wondering if anything had changed at all if they materialised in some of the shops today.

 

One could argue that no-one is obliged to buy pastel stuff.  But what does it say about our society as a whole, that this is assumed to be what is wanted by the masses?  Bit chicken and egg, I think.  Do supermarkets and others force people down this route or are they stocked to the gills because their research tells them it is what their customers want?

 

Of course, I am slightly bah humbug here.  My husband is as likely as many to be in that customer base.  Dashing to get a supermarket bouquet for fear of me feeling left out.  So probably therein lies another whole debate - is this pastel vision of motherhood aimed at the male customer base?  And if so, what does that say about men's true views?  Is the traditional (and pastel!) thing just very comforting or is it just easy?

 

Of course, it is lovely to receive gifts and, pastel or not, it is the thought that counts.  I can't help thinking it might be nice to have a less commercialised vision of Mothers Day though.  Personally, I am hoping for breakfast in bed and children who don't argue for the duration.  That's not much to ask, is it?! 

 

 

 

 

Racist Superiority

 

I have been trying for a few days now to write a post about Indian Summers, the new Channel Four drama series, based in 1930s British India.  I felt somehow that I ought to, given my family interest.

But there has been a great deal of comment already though.  Be it travelogues on Shimla where the series is set, travelogues on the places in Malaysia which actually doubled for vintage Shimla, pieces about the cast, the missionaries, the administration of British India.  Many British India chat rooms have been buzzing with the why's and where's, the authenticity and so on.

 

And you know, despite my many posts about adding colour and "feeling" to your family tree, somehow Indian Summers has felt far too close to home for me.  A step to far in seeing how things really were, seeing the segregation of British India up close and personal. 

My Anglo Indian grandmother and great aunt had referred occasionally to stories which showed the casual racism with which they had lived in British India.  Disturbing stories like going to a British club and being turned away because of the skin colour line on the sides of their hands, which were checked at the door.  Or because their voices "gave them away" as Anglo Indian.

Indian Summers puts this racism right out there for all to see.  The Royal Shimla Club was shown with a sign saying "No Dogs, No Indians", British characters casually refer to "blacky whites" for the Anglo Indian children of the nearby orphanage, the awful humiliation of an Indian civil servant invited to a British evening party.  Just a few examples. 

 

Then, today, I was listening to Desert Island Discs and the guest was Bryan Stevenson, an African American law professor and civil rights campaigner.  He was discussing the lack of "truth and reconciliation" in the US, after slavery ended, after the white supremacist terrorist activities or even after the civil rights battles of his own lifetime.  He talked eloquently of what he is up against but one story which struck me was of Stevenson was sitting, waiting, dressed in a suit, at the counsel table in a courtroom.  The judge and prosecutor came into the courtroom and immediately told him to get out, saying he had no right to be at counsel table without his lawyer.  Bryan Stevenson said that he told them who he was and they both laughed but offering no apology.  Stevenson forced himself to laugh along because he did not want to prejudice his client's case.  The client he was waiting to defend was white...  He said that it really made him think about the state of the nation - that it should be so completely assumed that the lawyer could not be the black man.

 

It could be a story straight out of Indian Summers, straight from the heart of British India.  And yet it is 21st century America.  One in three African American boy babies is now likely to go to jail at some time in their lives.  This statistic is the worst it has ever been.

 

In South Africa, the "truth and reconciliation" process referred to by Bryan Stevenson was aimed at allowing the two sides of apartheid to come together and talk and hopefully to move on and live in some kind of harmony.  By simply packing up and leaving, the British avoided the need for this in India.  To them, they were at the top of the heap and everyone "beneath" was one and the same.  All Indians, all as bad as each other, despite the Anglo Indians' attempts to "be British" and despite the many religious differences in the nation.  Indian Summers has, I think, done a fair job of showing this endemic feeling of superiority, shocking though it is to watch.  But what is more shocking is that in so many places in the world, the same attitudes still prevail. 

 

Do listen to Bryan Stevenson if  you have a chance.  It is a fantastic programme.  And incidentally, take care when Googling.. Turns out there is a US porn star called India Summers.....!

The Voice

Once again, Eldest had managed to riddle my PC with viruses.  I tried writing an iPad post last week but it is very hard work.  I can't work out how to scroll properly so end up posting and re-editing numerous times. Sorry.

 

Anyway, yesterday I got my creative writing course homework.  We were handed a poem called In the House of the Voice of Maria Callas and told to pick someone else famous for their voice.  We now have to create a 500 word story along the lines of said poem, which uses images of what and how Callas sang.  To say I am confused...  I did not do well with my story this week.  Everyone else had had two weeks to hone their stories.  They are not doing childcare during half term!  So I really need to shine on this....

 

It did get me thinking about voice and its impact though.  Initially, we had to firstly name three people and then choose one.  Someone at the class has chosen a nineteenth century castrato singer and someone else has chosen Plato.  However, to me, the inspiration for this task needs to come from hearing the voice for oneself.  I had put down Churchill, Callas (not knowing what was coming!), Sinatra, Olivier and Garbo.  Lots of people chose Churchill which goes to show the effect that oration has on listeners.  I doubt if any of the class were more than babies when Churchill died and his most famous speeches were fifteen years before that.  So I have chosen Frank Sinatra, thinking that I could attempt something Italian and/or mafia related.  We shall see.

 

On a family history tack though, it is very interesting to speculate on future family historians' available resources.  No longer will it be finding a rare cine film of an ancestor.  If the internet continues to store data at the current rate, they will be able to find chapter and verse for sight and sound of their ancestors - even, if their kin were so inclined, footage of actual births!  Personally, I don't have any film or sound sources of which I am aware.  My family have no cine films to digitise.  We did not even have one of the big clunky 1980s video cameras. The first film I took was of my husband crashing whilst attempting to water ski on holiday.  I also have a old video cassette with an ultra sound of my son in the womb.  Although, as Chandler says in Friends when confronted with similar, it does look a bit like a film of an alien ship about to attack the Starship Enterprise!

 

We should save voice though - now that we can.  Imagine if I could hear my nineteenth century ancestors!  What about even my grandparents' voices?  I have a strong memory of what I believe to be my Anglo Indian grandmother's voice but how does one know if it is correct without a comparison?  Her voice was of the "sing song" Indian-speaking-English-type.  [Apparently there are stories of Anglo Indians trying to get into British clubs in India, only to be turned away not because of their skin tone but because their voices gave them away.]  Certainly, many of Nana's expressions did bear a strong resemblance to those used by Indian and Pakistani families that we knew.  And my grandparents' siblings and cousins - my only comparison at the time - were very similar.  I have nothing from my maternal side either, despite having even met one of my great grandmother's on that side.

 

As you will know from previous posts, we recently lost my father in law.  At the moment it is still his voice on their answerphone.  My husband is not up to hearing this often at the moment.  However, I am desperate to find a way to preserve it for him.  We have little film or sound of his dad.  There is some, in old age with the grandchildren.  But very little of his music or his voice in earlier years.  He was a councillor but we have no footage of speeches.

 

Voice has a huge impact on how we feel about someone.  Look at David Beckham's much squeakier early voice (surely he has had lessons to deepen his tone!) and Margaret Thatcher, whose voice got lower (and more patronising!) every year, it seemed.  I do hope that data from Facebook and other social media will survive, not because our descendants should see all our selfies and moaning and jokes and so on.  But because recording voice is a pretty painless way of preserving a little bit of personality. 

Let there be dark

I am, it has to be said, a huge fan of Hilary Mantel's books Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.  I think I have previously written about going to see the stage plays in fact.

I was dreadfully nervous about the current television adaptation because so often, such things just do not live up to your expectations.  We all form such personal pictures in our heads when we read books that it is virtually impossible to please everyone with television or stage representations.  The best series are, in my humble opinion, the ones which best capture the essence of a book.

This morning, it has been reported that the Wolf Hall film-makers spent over £20,000 on candles.  A lot of the reporting since the series started has focussed on the low level lighting used.  People complaining that they can't see the "action" and so on.

Whilst agreeing that this is a large amount to spend on candles (a (candle)stick of which the Daily Mail will make good use, to beat the BBC!), I absolutely love the atmosphere created by the candles.  Finally, I thought after the first episode, we can see how it must have been.  It really was possible to be lurking in corners and hiding in rooms where people were exchanging confidences.  It was dark!

There is a tendency to look back at history - whether our own family's or the state's - through the view which we have today.  Perpetual light whenever and wherever we want it.  We find it impossible to believe that people could have lived in a world where you gathered around candles every evening or just went to bed.  I lived in a Victorian house until recently.  I never did truly experience it as it's original owners did though.  Even turning off the lights would not give me a Victorian view of the house - there was a dirty great street lamp of the worst orange sort right outside the house!  I was forced to get blackout blinds to get any quality of sleep!

Only a power cut can give any kind of authenticity and even those are often limited to one row of houses these days.  A city is never truly dark - car lights, torches, phones, emergency generators, you name it, we can combat the dark with it.  What are we afraid of?

I have ancestors who drove trains across India, who guarded Napoleon on St Helena, who did actually trade in the City of London in the 1600's, who worked in service at great houses.  They truly lived in  the dark.  The light from a roaring steam engine, firelight, flaming torches, carrying candles for their master to make his way to bed.  That was it.  Blips of light in a dark landscape.

Wolf Hall shows us how it felt to live in Tudor times.  It is not just a piece of "action".  It would be fascinating to see more plays and adaptations done in the same way.  Talk about shedding a whole new light on the subject....