Life's Subtleties

The other day I completed one of those online surveys all about sport, health, diet and so on.  One of my responses claimed that I go for a walk ('dog walking, with or without a dog') about once a week, and I realised that I haven't done so lately.  So, to restore some truth to my claim, I walked yesterday morning ... early, so as to avoid the forecast rain, which never came, but that's another blog altogether!

Walking is always a good time for thinking and, as I recalled what had prompted me to walk, I realised the skill of the survey's compiler.  A lot of the questions were in two parts, "how often in the past year ...?" and "how often in the last four weeks ...?"  Comparing my answers: the one an estimate based on my perceived lifestyle, but the other a fairly-recalled accurate count-up, I realised that this revealed, in a number of cases, how life is changing.  Habits formed with good intention are interrupted for genuine reasons but, before they can be restored, other 'stuff' begins to make regular demands on one's time.

I find my thoughts, especially when walking, drift to childhood memories, and I realised this week that I've reached - nay, well passed! - the age that my father would have been when he complained that he could recall clearly things from his childhood but couldn't remember what happened last week! I may not recall, as he did, seeing German prisoners-of-war working on the farm during WW1, but I do find that I can remember the names of many class-mates from fifty or sixty years ago!

Comparing some of the houses and the lifestyle of their occupants to what we knew in those days reveals countless changes of course, but most of those haven't happened overnight.  They've come about gradually, almost imperceptibly, just as my habit of walking has been overtaken by the need to spend the time on other things.  I wouldn't say my own experience is universally representative - far from it - but it's the only experience that I know in sufficient detail to comment about.  As well as differences in and around the home: the use of my time and relationships with the neighbours (virtually non-existent among flat-dwellers), there are noticeable changes in church and community life, too.

Twenty-five years ago - well into the computer age - I was editor of a church magazine.  I had a fairly up-to-date desktop publishing program on my computer at home, and prepared each month a four-A4-page original that would be sent to a nearby printer to be reproduced in the required quantities for distribution throughout four villages.  I have no idea what that parish is doing these days, but in the ten years or so that I've been at my present church, I've only seen a handful of magazine editions ... which I now believe to have been no more than the fruits of an exercise for a former curate.  It could be argued that such a publication is no longer necessary.  Apart from a church website, there is a facebook page, and essential information is disseminated by e-mail directly to the individuals concerned.  The cleaning and flower-arranging rotas no longer rely on half a page in a printed booklet!

And, of course, change isn't confined to local things.  We have only to look at our TV screens to see the evidence of that.  While the twenty-four-hour newsreels bring us the shape of today, endless documentaries provide a detailed analysis of how things used to be.  In many cases, the change from then to now didn't happen overnight in, say, 1979; it's been a gradual, almost insidious, transition as one development after another has made something else redundant.  The present verbal - and, sadly, sometimes not so verbal! - campaigns over the upcoming referendum on EU membership remind us that in international relations, too, changes have occured.  The present 28-country Union is a very distant cry from the Coal and Steel Community of 1952.

Who would have thought that such a far-reaching meditation could have resulted from a simple stroll around the block?