"The past is a foreign country.."

Earlier this week I received a surprise parcel in the mail. It was from my uncle in Sydney, who has been tracing the family history. The parcel contained one volume of that project, which concerns ancestors and relatives of my father.

I open the book and dive into a world that is my blood but which I never knew existed...

A many-times-great grandmother born in about 1694. Lived till nearly a hundred in that world long before penicillin or basic concepts of hygiene. Generation upon generation after her never leaving the borders of Northamptonshire in the English East Midlands.

Perhaps all the generations before her never leaving it either.

Reading and reading... I am reminded of tales like Wuthering Heights or Far from the Madding Crowd. Small, parochial worlds in the quiet English countryside, punctuated with eloping couples, deaths from vanished illnesses, and ever and always the fight for inheritances.

I get chills looking at the photographs.
One of a young lady in late 19th century clothing, sitting very formally. She's my great-grand mother.
But for the clothes and darker hair she's a replica of my sister. Down to my sister's habitual tilt of the head and facial expression.

Many of my father as a boy in wartime England.
Photos I think are of him as an older man, till I realise they are actually of his cousins who I have never known.

I remember my grandmother as stern, proper, old, extremely English, mind-bogglingly set in her ways, for whom everything was right in the world if we'd just sit and have a pot of tea... and there she is: circa 1953, wearing daringly short shorts, with a cheesy grin and leaning indecorously against a gate post.

And the stories...
A grandparent's half brother who was at Gallipoli and in British-occupied Palestine, having emigrated to Australia decades before anyone on my father's side that I had known about. He never married and "went bush", meaning he lived in no proper abode and just lived off the land he owned in the middle of what was then nowhere, till one of my grandfathers built him a house with his own hands and connected it to a generator.

"There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct -- not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration."

- Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Does anything really change? Or do the seasons just come and go?

He would have been 14

My eldest son would have turned 14 this month, but we Iost him to a rare cancer in 2007, short of his 11th birthday.

Not a day, not an hour, goes by without me thinking of all the things that should have been, and now won't be. All the things he told me he was going to do, while knowing, I think, in his way, that he would never have the chance.

Some people have intellectual reasons for believing there is no god. Very well-thought out ones.
But I just know.
Like a lot of people... I just know.
Where we go afterwards, I guess we'll find out. Or not.

When I was young I wanted to live forever. Now I see it all as a season. When the days grow short in mine, I won't complain.
I've had a glorious childhood, grew up in the only continent to become one country, lived in an ancient exotic land, married a wonderful woman, been a father three times, trained to fight for fun, known complete peace. It can't get much better than this.

As a child of half-Japanese heritage my son had a particular liking for anime and manga (Japanese comics). This is a song we played at his funeral. It's by an Australian artist called Colin Hay.
By chance someone put in on YouTube with some manga frames that are... oddly... apt.

I don't usually post personal stuff, but... anyway.
Don't feel you have to comment. This is just an outlet. And it's a good song.