The End

So this is my 53^rd and final blog... well, at least for the time being!

I’ve had great fun writing over the past 10 months and have genuinely appreciated every single one of the thousands of views. Thank you all, whoever you may be, for reading in part or full, the ramblings I've spouted!

Why to end it? Well, why not?

HOW to end it is the trickiest question…

So I've been banging on about this for ages now.

It’s my own little mantra that I TRY to live by - though not always successfully I might add, as life isn’t always so easy as to consistently carry on with perfectionist and utopian standards. Nonetheless I constantly strive to retain hope in the words.

I blogged a bit about this at Christmas, as I like linking the theory to a child’s wonderment of that event, but I thought it would be nice to leave you with it today:

Belief

Throughout your life, you will often need the capacity to believe in yourself, and in your friends and your family, even when it’s incredibly hard to do so.

Love

Love is the greatest power you will ever know.

Love will light your life from the inside out, even during its darkest hours when you are sad. Love will never burn out as somebody somewhere will always love YOU.

Spirit

Spirit is genuinely real and enduring. The spirit of good and kind people or acts should never be underestimated

So have Belief, Love and Spirit in abundance, and thanks again for dropping by XxX

And that’s that.

Father Christmas is REAL!

Whether you sit on the splintered commercialism fence or throw yourself fully into the spirit of the Christmas season, if you have children one thing is for sure… there will come a time when they will approach you and want to know the truth.

“Is Father Christmas*   (*Santa Claus / Pere Noel / Babbo Natale / Daidí na Nollag / Moş Crăciun / Christmas Baba / Christmas Thaathaa / Weihnachtsmann / Dun Che Lao Ren / Papai Noel / Viejo Pascuero / Kanakaloka / Swiety Mikolaj / cha Giáng sinh)   real?”

(Hopefully) many years of your child’s life will have passed with them enjoying the wonders of Christmas before asking you that question, but how can it be answered in the most appropriate way?

I’ve been a dad for nearly a dozen years now, but it still doesn’t give me any right or interest in telling a fellow parent how to parent their child – but I recall how my own dad helped me to discover the mystery behind Father Christmas.

I was 13 years old (yes 13…I was a shy and sheltered young lad!), and decided to broach the subject in the kitchen one evening. So I listened intently, hoping for a decent explanation, following years of teasing from friends who insisted I was bonkers to still believe in a story about a man in a red cloak that carried a bag containing billions of presents.

He looked me in the eye – as he always did (and still does!) and started talking about the spirit of Christmas.

So did I buy his explanation? 

Well fast forward through several years full of experiences and life altering highs and lows, and I find myself now rapidly approaching 40 years old, around the same age my dad was when we spoke.

And I STILL believe in Father Christmas.

I found that the event of Christmas became less special as I moved from being a teenager into a man, though I strived to keep the spirit alive.

And then my own children were born, and their enjoyment of Christmas for me is like living through Christmas as a child all over again.

One cannot script this life. But if at all possible, including elements borrowed with pride from what my own dad told me on that winters day, in a deep and dark December in 1988, I tried to convey the below to my children when their time arrived…

“Until this time came, and until you asked this question, I couldn’t reveal the answer. But I believe Father Christmas is about 3 things:

· Belief

· Love

· …and Spirit

Belief

The existence of Father Christmas is not really a lie – it’s a secret kept to help children believe in things they cannot hold or see.

Throughout your life, you will often need the capacity to believe in yourself, in your friends and your family, even when it’s incredibly hard to do so.

Love

Christmas is the symbol of the greatest power you

will ever know: Love.

Love will light your life from the inside out, even

during its darkest hours when you are sad.

Love will never burn out as somebody somewhere

will always love YOU.

Spirit

But the best reason to forever believe is because

spirit is real and enduring.

Father Christmas is an embodiment of magical spirit that lives inside of everyone who believes in him. He is real for as long as you believe he is real, and not for one moment longer.

When your friends tell you that he’s not real, they are correct… he isn’t real for them anymore.

If you believe he is real, like I do, then you can keep Father Christmas alive in your heart for as long as you want to do so (even when you’re as old as I am!) for Christmas lasts even longer for those who choose to believe.

All the times you do kind things for people throughout the year expecting nothing in return, well THAT is also the spirit of Christmas”

Have Belief

Have Love

Have Spirit

…and have yourself a merry little Christmas forever   XxX

When Technology goes Missing

A missing child is always big news, and rightfully so. Some cases attract more attention than others but staggeringly over 140,000 under 18’s go missing every year – and every 3 minutes another missing child report comes in to the Police.

One of the positives to modern technology and social networking is that news of a missing child invariably gets to millions of people rapidly, therefore increasing the chance of a happy ending. Speed of communication has not always been so present though.

Strangely enough during the summer of 1978, I managed to become a missing child for a short period of time…well a short period in my mind, and probably only a few hours in real time, but in all likelihood a lifetime for my Mum.

Evidently my Mum was chatting in the front garden to a neighbour. I was milling about and my baby brother was in his buggy. She took her eye off me momentarily and within seconds I had gone.

The rear gardens to the houses backed onto woods which bordered the old Hove Golf Course, and thankfully not the A293 (A27 link road) that opened in 1992, so onto the lawns was really the only direction I could have gone.

Having discovered me missing, my Mum naturally ran around in a panic and got neighbours up and down the road looking for a blond (yes blond) 2 year old boy.

 

Bear in mind back then not everybody had landline phones, and NOBODY had a mobile cellular phone, so Mum had to find someone somewhere with a landline phone to make the call to the Police. She couldn’t call my Dad as he was at work driving his bus and therefore totally uncontactable, so having called the Police and given details they said they’d pop along shortly. She then went onto the golf course with a few of the neighbours to ask the golfers (of which there were many) if they’d seen me.

No joy.

From my point of view I can just about remember walking along a stretch of grass (supposedly the golf course) and subsequently walking up the A270 Old Shoreham Road towards the junction with Hangleton Road, which is a distance of just over half a mile.

Albeit the Old Shoreham Road is far busier now than it was then, it was still a major road back in 1978 due the Brighton by-pass having not yet been built.

I couldn’t have been on the roadside long though before I was approached by two young girls who had got out of a bronze car and started to speak to me.
In fact the photo below (taken in 1987 Dave Denyer - with thanks) shows exactly the spot where they picked me up! 

I have no recollection who they were or what they said, but evidently they took me to a Police box* in Olive Road, Hove

*#tardis

Soon enough the Police bought me home to my relieved Mum. When my Dad got home, oblivious to what had happened, he asked my Mum if she’d given me a bloody good hiding for running off!

It’s fashionable to knock modern technology at the moment – and in particular mobile phones – but in some cases, what would we do without them?

Moon River (Part 3 of 3)

The majority of you reading this will know I’m neither particularly special nor otherwise, but I think I rightfully recognise that my present family care, and my descendants might care too, about what happened on occasions during my lifetime. Exciting or dull, the content shouldn’t matter.

So to cut a long story short (too late) - Families and individuals COULD and SHOULD make more of an effort to record their lives for the benefit of future generations. I spent time researching my family tree in 2006…what a laborious task that was/is!

Even with help from relations that could recall folks who lived and died long before I came into being, it proved to be a lot of effort with little reward.

What I did ascertain is that I know barely anything about anyone before three generations prior to mine. Isn’t that insulting to their memories? Without them and the way they were, I wouldn’t even be here – well certainly not in the physical form I am now. It’s probably neither here or there whether my soul would have ended up in someone else’s body depending on your view of ‘how we come to be’ and karma amongst other theories.

So get yourself a project.

Could you possibly document everything about yourselves?

Highly unlikely is the probable answer.

Even my own efforts, aided by what I think is a good recollection of events that happened to me, caused me to question at many stages if I really ought to record absolutely everything.

But I found a healthy sprinkling is better than nothing and if it only provides the slightest interest for my children’s children’s children and beyond, then I think it will have been worth it.

Hopefully it will give them the opportunity beyond the 21^st century to find out about their ancestors during my generation. A joy I was denied when trying to find out information about my relations who lived in the early 20^th century.

         

Now here’s where I am a tease!

I don’t want my retro diary seen in totality until after I depart this world. The whole point is for the future to look back and see – not for the present to judge.

Indeed my work is ongoing, though I have made a rule of working three years in arrears, and if I can’t remember something I notch it up to it not being worthy of being remembered. 

If it never gets read then so be it, but it’s been tremendously cathartic in the making. 
And as a cherry on top, you might even just feel a bit more at peace with yourself!

Moon River (Part 2 of 3)

So should I try to forget what I can’t help but remember?

Confused yet?

I honestly don’t know if I should try to forget aspects of the past, but back in 2007 I started to write a retro diary anyway.

A manuscript collection of ruses is how it could be described and I wrote it as how I honestly saw certain situations in my life from as far back as I could remember.

I’m realistic enough to acknowledge that my version of events may actually be wholly inaccurate on occasions and for that I would be genuinely sorry to any reader. For starters, my lovely brother is always dubious about the accuracy of my recollections!

But being a great advocate of the fact that there are at least two sides to every story, I respect being corrected ad hoc.

However for the purpose of what I wrote, it’s just how I personally saw events (or non-events) unravel – it’s eternally incredible to me as to what is important to some and not to others, but that’s life I suppose!

Does it sound like I actually do have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? You might not be far wrong. Besides which I wrote my diary year by year of course!

The reason I even began writing it back in 2007 is largely due to Grandparents.

For me I felt very fortunate to have experienced loving Grandparents during my upbringing. Both sets of my Grandparents gave me memories and experiences that will remain with me forever. The stories I’ve heard recounted time and again did, at times, get humorously repetitive, but who’s going to recount them once the storytellers are long gone – or if the memory has failed? Their stories were woven from times when they saved my country and gave me the chance to have the life I have and the lifestyle I live.

But did I write them down? Sadly not at all.

Presently, the most I can tell MY children and Grandchildren about their family history, is a diluted version of events with barely any names to the characters, and frankly I feel that’s just not right. It’s certainly not an honourable memoriam

Third and final part tomorrow! Click here

Moon River (Part 1 of 3)

"I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods..." wrote Truman Capote. What a terrific opening line for a book – am I allowed to nick it? Not that I’ve read the book in question (Breakfast At Tiffany’s) but I have seen the film too many times to remember and although purists may shudder, I am happy not to ever read the book as the film does enough to satisfy and intrigue me.

The opening line attracts me as I feel I actually ‘get’ what Mr Capote means, whilst I rightly or wrongly suspect many people don’t want to...

Maybe it’s just that for many valid differing reasons, they choose not to remember their lives, be it yesterday or yesteryear. That’s fine – each to their own of course, but I’m not sure I mentally have a choice. I think I ‘get’ it because for better or for worse I seem bound to not forget many things that have happened to me. I wouldn’t dare to say for certain if it’s a good or bad thing actually, but I suspect it’s both…and for good measure it has at times been a hindrance to others too - my memory serves me pretty well, and no-one likes a know-it-all.

I’ve fought many rages trying to plead that I never professed to be someone who always has an answer to everything. My battle is usually that I feel an urge to have a perfectionist state where everything is factually accurate – OCD alert! Over the years I’ve realised how wrong my approach is, and I find that the older I get I’m moving more to the state of ‘live and let live’, which is a far healthier and more friendly way to be!

Part 2 in due course...! Click here