Remember, Remember ...

Yesterday I listened to last weekend's Irish History Show on podcast.  There was a feature about TV viewing in Ireland before the momentous occasion on 31st December 1961 when Telefís Éireann broadcast for the first time. With BBC and ITV receivable in many parts of the country, it was reported that - I think in 1957 - there were more TV sets in Ireland than in Norway, Sweden or Denmark!  My mind drifted back through the years, and I recalled the arrival of the first TV set in our home.  What year was it?  How old was I at the time?  My memory was hard pressed to come up with a definite - let alone accurate - answer.

My powers of recall had already received a shock earlier in the day.  I'd spent most of it trawling through the contents of the third drawer of my filing cabinet, having discovered a day or two ago that it was so full I couldn't squeeze another single sheet of paper into it.  Happily, after the removal of quite a pile of unwanted archives, this is no longer the case.

The exercise brought to light early copies of a newsletter I used to circulate to a small number of close friends on a monthly basis ... a forerunner to this blog in some ways.  I remembered a time (the year could have been 2002 or 2003 ... or even 2004!) when I offered a short course in a local adult education group, and after learning something of the admin required, I was very thankful that there were no takers!  During the morning I learned that it did indeed take place in the autumn of 2002.  What I had completely forgotten was that the idea came from my acceptance of an invitation the previous winter to deliver two talks to a history group in my home town!

So, how reliable is my memory?  How reliable is anyone's memory?  I shall soon be boring my friends with stories of missions from the now completed archive of my courier career ... but how accurate will they be?  Just how many times did I try to sleep in the back of my van on a cold night ... and then give up after an hour and drive on in the dark?  ... which brings me to why I was up at 5.15 yesterday morning sorting out files all over the lounge floor.

For a couple of weeks now, sleep has been something of a challenge.  I'll wake up in the early hours and then find it difficult or impossible to get back to sleep again.  It could be the unusually warm winter nights; it could be the constant list of things on my mind to be achieved in connection with the transition from a semi-working van-owner to a fully-retired car-owner; or it could be some kind of 'cabin fever' the result of having no need to go out and cope with the traffic on the highways of our land, but instead to occupy myself all day at the desk and keyboard.

Cabin fever?  Somehow my mind wandered - it's been doing a lot of that lately - to Noah, cooped up in that smelly ark for weeks on end.  He must have suffered from a very severe bout of it!  And thinking further along those lines (although I realise that here I'm straying into the province of my 'other' blog), I thought of a smelly stable 2,000 years ago, where a young woman was forced by an accommodation problem to give birth to her firstborn child ...

At which point, it's time to wish all my readers Nadolig Llawen, Fröliche Weinachten, Milad Majid or whatever is your preferred term: Happy Christmas!  There may well not be a blog next week, but I'll be back in the New Year.