Freedom

It's been another busy week, much of it tied up with the addictive pastime of family history.  Today I've been chasing a Suffolk family in Lincolnshire. Many families from rural Suffolk migrated in the mid-nineteenth century to find work.  Some, no doubt, were encouraged to go by parents and elder siblings to relieve the pressure on the domestic economy caused by the decline in agriculture.

Others, on the other hand, may well have found pressure in the opposite direction.  Landlords or employers might have been loath to lose the services of a useful and hard-working man, possibly unable to pay what it might have taken him to stay but willing to apply emotional pressure to prevent this move.  In some cases, other pressures, too, might have to be overcome before that long journey could be made.

Most often, the favoured destination was the cotton mills of Lancashire, or the woollen trades of Yorkshire, or even coal mines further afield.  This particular family settled in a Lincolnshire town and set up a photographic business.  Over the years it expanded; one son explored the cycle trade, and eventually embraced motors as well.  Another developed a trade as a maker of picture frames.

The important factor in all these lives was freedom.  Whatever the pressures - financial, family or anything else - they had the freedom, if they chose to exercise it, to go where they could make a new and more profitable life for themselves and their families.

Freedom is one thing that comes with retirement, I find.  I'm free to go wherever I can persuade my little motor to take me.  I'm free, if I so decide, to leave the car at home and 'let the train take the strain' (as the advert of some years ago used to put it).  This latter was my choice on Monday, when I exercised an entirely different sort of freedom.

I remember giving a talk many years ago about giving to charity, and being able to let go of one's money.  How feasible it might be I couldn't say, but my recommendation concerned going to a fairground.  I suggested that, well before leaving home, the fair-goer should decide how much he or she could afford to 'lose' at the fairground, take that amount only with him or her, and leave everything else at home.  Once there, I suggested, one would then have complete freedom to use that money on rides, dodgems, coconut shies or slot machines ... in whatever way one chose, with neither concern nor guilt, because of the decision that had already been made.

My daughter had given me as a Christmas present a plastic card - what in card form a few years ago would be have been a book token - and I had chosen Monday to go to the appropriate bookshop to use it.  My journey to the city had one purpose and one purpose only.  From the time I left home to walk to the station, until I returned some hours later, my time was allocated and I knew it wouldn't be available for anything else.  There was therefore no competition, no regretting what I wasn't doing instead.  It wasn't until I had been walking around the shop for well over an hour that I realised the completeness of the freedom I had enjoyed.  As I looked at one volume after another, my interest solely on what I was reading, time had passed without my noticing.

I wonder what other new freedoms are waiting around the corner of this weekend!