Looking Forward and Back.

As I trudged uncomfortably across the cold, grey little market town this morning, it occurred to me that I really should try to keep this blog going. After all, what else is there to enliven me now that the sparklers are all spent, aspiration has faded into the mist of distant memory, all sense of optimism is lying comatose, and the gradual but inexorable decline in physical capability is putting much of that which requires muscle power and lung capacity increasingly out of reach? But where do I start?

Well, over the past few weeks of blogging hiatus, several posts of customary type suggested themselves. But each one had its own little cocktail of angles, and they’ve become jumbled in a mind still only slightly raised from the desolate state in which it’s been languishing. Imagine taking, say, four boxes each containing a complete jigsaw puzzle. Open the boxes and pour all the pieces into a bag, shake them all up, and then try to make four accurate pictures from the melee. It’s a bit like that.

I thought of starting with the crisis in the NHS, and the tracing of the issue back to Mrs Thatcher’s infatuation with monetarism and free market economics. But it was too big, had too many angles, and was too painful for someone who’s spent his life taking the jewel in the crown of British culture for granted. Sad though it is to say, I couldn’t face the mental effort of organising it all. Better to start with something small and preferably humorous, but all suitable candidates were buried in plain graves and I hadn’t the means of disinterring them.

I decided instead to take a trip down memory lane and seek the start of the whole blogging business. I found the first proper post (the actual first post was a bio of sorts) made on January 15^th 2010 and thought I might as well post it again, since the people who were reading the blog then have long since given up on me and my ramblings and decamped to greener pastures. It was titled ‘Values’ and said:

Several days on from the appalling earthquake in Haiti, I read today that the international community has pledged £200 million in aid. Another news report I read recently said that British banks alone give £50 billion to their executives in bonuses. The Duke of York says we shouldn't be concerned about the size of bankers' bonuses because, in the world of international finance, it is a paltry sum. So what does that make the international aid effort?

It wouldn’t quite pass muster now and would require some editing, but it did set the tone for much of what was to follow. (And look what happened to the Duke of York a decade later.) I found it interesting that, for all the changes I’ve undergone over the past thirteen years, my distaste for the greed, crushing inequality, and gross dereliction of humanitarian values so apparent in the human condition lives on

That’s my only excuse for re-posting it and it will have to suffice.

(It just occurred to me that I could have re-told the story of what I was experiencing exactly twenty eight years ago to the very hour, but I think I’ve already told it at least three times on various Ides of March and a further reprise would have been unconscionable.)