On Looking Back

The English press were full of reviews of the year and decade (I thought it ended with 2010?) when we were over there. A good way to fill column inches but I suppose someone, somewhere likes this kind of thing. And looking back at events over time seems to be something our species is doomed/programmed to do. I wonder if we ever learn anything from this, or is it rather that we get the chance to falsify whatever it was we think took place? Or do we luxuriate in a kind of nostalgia for the unreclaimable?

I find myself thinking back over a particularly enjoyable December, and remembering odd bits and pieces of the year that was. I know there'll be a few retrospective pieces in this Far Place over the coming days.

And whilst in England there were odd moments in which aspects of the past suddenly came alive for me quite disconcertingly, the result, I suppose, of occupying the same spaces, though dislocated in the dimension of time. At one point the girls were treated to a monologue from me on what it was like to have bathed, or been bathed, in an old tin tub in front of the fire. I think I was telling them how lucky they are to enjoy the luxury of showers and the like, but I must say, I couldn't recall any kind of discomfort in my memories - quite the opposite. Curiously my sister got onto exactly the same topic, linked to the joys of an outside toilet in winter, a week or so later, quite unprompted - yet I don't think either of us have mentioned those aspects of our childhood for years. Let's hope we don't begin to become tiresome on this, though we probably will, probably have already. One of the rewards of survival: winning the right to bore the young with one's improbable tales.