Thank you, Mr Hartley!

I hadn't intended to write a blog this week, but somehow needs must.  Let me begin with a pictue:

Here's my lounge ... or a corner of it.  You'll see I live amidst quite a large collection of books: this is only one section of it!  When I exchanged my computer for a new laptop this autumn, I retained the screen as an extension display.  It now sits opposite my armchair, from where this picture was taken.  I have no TV, but watch catch-up programmes through the computer, so this makes watching them more comfortable.

Many of the books, I confess, I haven't read.  One of these is one that I bought because it is one that we studied at school, L P Hartley's 'The Go Between'.  It's a romantic drama, set in Edwardian times, and a dramatisation of it appeared on TV earlier this year.  The book's opening words came home to me with some force this week, prompting this blog-post,  "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

I've spent much of the last two weeks going through two drawers of my filing cabinet, reviewing, sorting, removing stuff that either is no longer required or relevant to current life, or which should never have been kept in the first place.  I hadn't intended to do it in the run-up to Christmas, but it became a necessity when something I do want to keep couldn't be squeezed into place!

As the exercise has progressed I've found myself re-living past times, discovering things I'd totally forgotten, and drifting back to events that happened ten, twenty ... in one case almost forty years ago!  And out of it all has come a sense of perspective.  I now see many situations that, had they been met by the present me, would have been dealt with differently ... or might not have been confronted at all!

When I was briefly working in the USA at the millennium, I learned a deep truth, that any attempt to re-create an English way of doing things in California is doomed to failure from the outset.  It is a different country, with its own culture, ways of living, and doing all sorts of things.  As a complete set of behaviours they work, just as the corresponding complete set of English behaviours work in and of themselves.  As the saying goes, 'when in Rome, do as the Romans do'.  (Sorry for the geographical confusion there!)

Another thing that I attempted this week was to scan onto my computer a two-page document that I'd found in one of those files.  I haven't needed to use OCR software for many years, and the program on my laptop is not the same as the one I used long ago.  However I tried, a single page was all I could get it to cope with.  I even tried removing the program completely and re-installing it!  Still only one page could I manage.  I gave up, copied page one, copied page two, and added one to the other through the word processor.

I woke up this morning with a sense of contentment.  As I look back through the lens of this week at the past year, I realise that the plans I had a year ago for the next two years will never be fulfilled as I saw them then.  The same ends - more or less - have been achieved in a shorter time frame.  Life as I imagined it over twenty years ago just didn't happen.  Things turned out dramatically differently from the way I had expected.  And while I wouldn't want to go through some of those experiences again, the me that has emerged is more rounded, more capable in many ways, with a greater sense of achievement, although in ways that didn't even cross the horizon of my imagination then.  I realise that there are many things I'm not able to do, but I know there is contentment in those that I can.

So today I say 'thank you' to Mr Hartley and his century-old wisdom, and my Christmas prayer for all my readers across the world is that they may find the same contentment in their own lives that I know today.