They were such times...

It was such a time, such a world, with such places, sights and things, and we were such people as once knew and moved through such a world.

It was also a world deep-scarred by the cruel hand of war.

But was it really as we are now pleased to remember it? Were those places and things as we recall them so many years long past? Were we those people, those fresh young faces? Did it happen as our memory has fixed it in our mind’s eye? Was it in this same world, in these same places and spaces where it all went on? Was it here that we lived a life that was of that time and of that world, never to be so again?

Does this happen anymore?

Was it for these times that we strove and for these things that we longed and for this state of being that we dreamed? Could we have imagined how it would be, how we would fare, and how our lives would run their course far into the future? That future is now this present, and this present is also our future and... our future end. The hopes and dreams of years to come are the memories and souvenirs of years now gone. The fresh waters of the fast-flowing river have slowed to the stagnant water of a turgid lake and we did not see when one became the other.

They were such times whose rich promise matched and stoked our desires, such days as stretched out to infinity. The world was always as we had come to know it and would forever be so. Family and friends too continued seemingly unchanging since first we knew them and would always be such. Our universe was stable, predictable, constant, slow and knowable, and we had it in our hand and under our control. So we thought.

Were we the last generation that would feel the undiluted promise of the future? Were we the last of the innocents, the dreamers, the hopefuls? Was the world we knew breathing its last while we opened the doors of experience that loomed limitless before us? In a time when the instantaneous and the global promised more than they delivered, could we have imagined our existence otherwise? We the hopeful, the gullible, the naïve, the children of the war generation scarred by savage conflict and full of terrible memories.

The Beatles will forever be identified with the 1960s

But either way it did not matter. It did not depend on us. The clock ticked on, patiently marking the passage of time, the days altered in colour and meaning, our certainties grew less certain, our values and beliefs grew dimmer and less reassuring, and our lives became imbued with a sense of apprehension we could not understand. But we were young and simple and confident and brash, and we had the wind in our sails and the sun on the horizon. We had youth and strength and energy and resolve, and we would not be told.

Yet even as we had youth in our bones and hope in our hearts, our era, our world, was nearing its end and it was not the world that our fathers had fought and died for or even imagined. As the old generations passed out of this realm and we took up the baton of life, stepping diffidently into the breach, we could not know we would be the first generation that would be shaken to the core by a tide of change that would sweep away all certainty, stability, conviction and self-assurance and leave a void in our hearts and anxiety in our souls.

They were such times as shall never again be seen and we were such folk as could glimpse the limitless possibilities of a world that was on the move, set in motion by the past and driven forward by the future.  Glimpse them we might but understand them we could not. The fast-flowing but tame river of life was turning into a raging torrent that would burst its banks and hurls us all into an unknown landscape where nothing was as it seemed, where the transient would replace the constant and the fast and furious would dislodge the slow and steady.  

Those unmistakable bell-bottoms of the 1970s!

The past was ours, the present is everybody's, and the future is out of our hands. So it is and so it has always been. The world we came into was black and white and grey and grim; the world we leave behind is a kaleidoscope of colours and a confusion of sights and sounds. We lived and we died and were reborn and must die again. We are you and you are us. You lived in us and now we will live in you. You are our future and we are your past.

In us you see yourselves and our hopes will be your hopes, our laughter and tears will be your laughter and tears, our joys and fears will be your joys and fears, our dreams will be your dreams. We once gave you life as you yourselves now give life, and some day to come you may say to those that follow: “It was such a time, such a world, with such places, sights and things, and we were such people as once knew and moved through such a world."

(Dedicated to my beloved mother who passed away so many years ago and whose passing changed me forever. She has lived in me as I may hope to live in my children. God bless her!)

My Birthday

Yes, it's my birthday and I'm wishing myself a happy birthday on here. It would be nice to have lots of fellow bloggers wishing me a happy birthday but, since that is about as likely as my growing a pair of wings and taking to the skies, I'm doing the job myself! How old am I? Well, let's just say I'm one year older than I was last year on this day, and leave it at that, shall we? After all, it's rude to ask a gentleman his age.

Needless to say, having my birthday on the day after Jesus's birthday, is no fun, in fact it's pretty shitty, as you might imagine. It means it is completely overshadowed by Christmas, that I have always received one lot of presents, taking in Christmas and my birthday, and that friends and family have been too busy organising for Christmas to think too much about my birthday. This bothered me when I was a child and a teenager and when people's presents and presence were very important to me, but it has long ceased to concern me now that I am much older and do not even really want to celebrate my birthday. But having one's birthday so close to Christmas day has been and always will be crappy and I wouldn't wish it on anyone!

Just take a look at that dark chocolate mousse cake. Wicked, isn't it? If the devil had a birthday cake, you might imagine it looking something like that. The blackest of chocolate with a forest of burning candles as a hairdo. If you manage to avoid singeing your eyebrows on those candles, the over-rich concentrated mass of chocolate is sure to make you sick as a parrot!

And of course we mustn't forget the presents. The above two are not mine, by the way. They only serve as props to give me an excuse to write about Xmas presents. They are 'generic' presents; often representative of presents whose wrapping is better than their content! In fact, with lovely wrapping such as this, if the gift inside isn't any good, you find yourself regretting you damaged the wrapping when you opened it up and now you can't use it to wrap up another present.

Christmas Thoughts I

So here we are again, at the threshold of another Christmas, poised to enjoy ourselves, by hook or by crook, and dreading what may go wrong over this critical period. The festivities have begun, Xmas cards sent out and pre-Xmas bashes attended; Xmas shopping is well under way if not already done, presents have been bought, wrapped up and some of them even given out, and Xmas fare has been brought in and stuffed in the larder and the fridge which is now groaning under the weight. There may be some last-minute things to do, some last-minute arrangements to see to, some last-minute gifts or food items to get in before you can finally sit back and contemplate Christmas Day with equanimity and without suffering panic attacks. Anything missing, anything not right, anything that needs fixing, must be attended to now because time is quickly running out.

Well, this is one side of Christmas, maybe the side most familiar to all of us. But there is another side. This is the time of the year when everything is magnified, when anything that is bad in your life will be felt all the keener and appear all the worse. If, for some reason, there is sadness in your heart, the sadness will seem all that greater. If... your life has taken a wrong turning, you are missing the company of someone, you have lost a loved one, certain relationships have gone sour or broken down, certain hopes have been dashed, aspirations snuffed out, dreams wrecked... if you feel you have been treated badly or snubbed by certain friends or relations... if you feel alone, forgotten, unloved, deprived of the affection of certain persons... in short, if things are not as they should be and your life is in a mess or seems empty and meaningless, then Christmas will heighten your sadness and your sorrow and, though you might put on a brave face and try to join in with others in the festive spirit, deep down inside you’re hurting and you cannot wait for Christmas to be over so you don’t have to pretend to be merry and joyful and happy and you won’t have to take part in all the festive activities that have become a part of the Christmas ethos.

Yet there is worse to be found in this world... there are those who are truly alone, who have no-one to care about them, who are deprived of human warmth and affection, who, for one reason or another, are isolated from society in general... the old and the infirm, the mentally and physically handicapped, those who have little or no family or friends or have been abandoned over the years by their close ones. There will be people who dread Christmas, fearful of spending it alone or in the company of strangers or persons indifferent to or resentful of them. Essentially they are the four h’s... the homeless, the helpless, the hopeless, and the hapless, and they are unlikely to feel much festive cheer and comfort at this time, rather their plight will be accentuated and they will feel even more benighted and more bereft.

Truly this is a world of many divisions and discrepancies and life is a constant struggle to survive and to be happy for as long as we have breath in our body. Christmas time sharpens our senses, concentrates our minds, intensifies our emotions and exaggerates our reactions. At Christmas the good seems better but the bad seems worse. There are no shades of grey, only black and white. Relationships are tested to breaking point and tolerance is stretched to the limit. The demands and upsets of Christmas can constitute a tinder-box. It needs just that little spark to set it off. But, with all that said, Christmas can be a time of great joy, of togetherness, of camaraderie, of celebration and goodwill, even, dare i say it, of Christian charity and love, when we all commemorate in our own way the birth of a baby those many centuries ago who, whether we believe in him or not, shook this world to its very foundations and transformed it forever.