All Over by Christmas?

It's alleged that this was the cry at the beginning of the First World War. People thought that this was merely a storm in a Balkan tea-cup, and it would all be over by Christmas.  Tell that to the chaps who were sinking in the mud of Passchendaele in the summer and autumn of 1917!  This is one of many linked thoughts that have been going through my mind this week.

I like to watch stuff on BBC i-Player while I eat my dinner and, in the last few days, I've discovered a collection of interviews with WW1 survivors, recorded in the early 1960s.  Some of their memories are quite traumatic, and I found myself wondering about their reaction had they known at the beginning of the war just how things would develop.  It's a problem I'm grappling with myself at the moment, still in the early months of my retirement.  I've never been good with uncertainty; I like to know the end at the beginning ... perhaps that's why I rarely read novels!

This morning I awoke from a dream in which two mothers were sitting at a kitchen table with the son of one and the daughter of the other, who had just fallen in love.  The young ones were discussing their likes and dislikes about where to live, and the mothers aggressively supported the conflicting views of their respective offspring.  Suddenly the young man spoke sharply to the older ladies, telling them to keep their ideas to themselves.  Seizing his beloved's hand, he made for the door.  Stunned, the mothers came to realise that they had been trying to live the lives of the young people for them. After a while, the boy and girl returned, announcing their engagement, as witnessed by the daisy chain around the girl's finger.

After marriage, of course, come children.  At a recent gathering at church (I can't recall the context; simply to whom I was speaking), I spoke about being present at my daughter's birth and how, many years later, my children were looking after me.  "If there's something wrong with the computer," I said, "I have only to e-mail my son, and he's always willing to come and sort it out.  And, look! I'm wearing socks knitted by my daughter." I'm sure that, when I made my way home bleary-eyed from the hospital all those years ago, I gave no thought to the possibility that the bundle of joy I'd just seen enter the world would one day be keeping my feet warm!

Last November, following a newspaper obituary, I started a project to extend my coverage of the family of my great-grandmother's brother-in-law.  Since I was already aware of some of the generations, I thought at the outset that it would, in those famous words, be over by Christmas.  I finally despatched the results to my 'non-cousin', a great-great-nephew of that brother-in-law, last weekend.  By the middle of this week, as I mopped up the aftermath of the exercise, my eye was already on the next such task.  Having now discovered at least fifty new names, descendants of a Suffolk family who had migrated to Lancashire in the mid-19th century, I'm not making the same short-term assumption about them!

And just to complete this current set of outset-outcome discord, this week I've been tweaking some of the investments in my pension fund, in order - hopefully - to increase the income therefrom.  Not surprisingly, I've been wondering just how long that fund will last, once I start using it.  As ever, I want to know the end from the beginning.

I wonder when - or whether - I shall learn to take things as they come, and be content with the present, instead of worrying about the future!