Regaining Sovereignty

It's a phrase that has been accorded a heightened currency in recent months that some would say is unjustified.  I don't wish to comment on that here, but it is one that summarises the positive nature of my personal feelings just at this moment. 

Two weekends ago I sat in A&E on Sunday evening looking at an X-ray picture and was told that recovery would probably be 'two to three weeks'.  I had just learned that I didn't have broken ribs - not even cracked ribs - and no dark glamour could now be claimed by revealing that I had simply bruised my chest: after all, the only bruise that could be seen was the size of a postage stamp!  All I could offer to explain my reluctance to do things was 'I had a fall'.

What I did know was that a wide variety of small movements that are part of normal life were suddenly painful and to be avoided if at all possible.  In the last week many of these have no longer caused trouble, and I'm left with difficulty in only one or two things like getting out of bed; even breathing deeply is virtually pain-free.

As I mentioned last week, I attended a talk on the Burston School Strike and, quite apart from that expedition, this event has suddenly taken on a higher profile for me.  One of my online friends was looking for something in her home and - on the 105th anniversary of the start of the Strike - discovered a map of the walk of protest the children had taken that sunny April day.  She announced this fact on Facebook, accompanied by an album of present-day photographs of some of the places mentioned on the map.

Comments have been posted this week in reaction to the map and/or the photos.  One person reported that a BBC documentary about the Strike is available on YouTube (just search for 'Burston School Strike' and you'll find all three 15-minute parts) and then - to my amazement - one of my many first-cousins-once-removed said she'd watched this and that it was 'lovely to see my nanny Violet there'.  Violet Potter was the 13-year-old girl who had led the Strike in that last spring before the First World War.

I can remember as a teenager in the early '60s delivering groceries to her younger brother.  At that time, and in the documentary made ten years or so later, he was running the village post office, but I had no idea that, about 11 months before I was born, his niece had married one of my cousins!  Such are the inevitable consequences of a large family who were too busy with their own lives to socialise very much beyond the occasional funeral!

This afternoon I lost all track of time as I rekindled my latent family history enthusiasm and traced the Potter family back to the late 19th century, discovering and documenting those links of which I was hitherto unaware.

My other activity this afternoon provides a third strand to my positive reflections this evening.  Last spring and summer I seemed to be fighting a prolonged battle with certain unidentified neighbours and the local council over the non-collection of recycling waste from my home community.  To cut a very long story short, the council had - quite rightly - been refusing to empty recycling bins that were 'contaminated' either by materials put into the wrong bins, or plastic bags in which the right items had been deposited.  Since we all use a small number of communal bins, this action deprived me of facilities to dispose of my own recyclable waste.

The situation has now greatly improved, but one lingering aspect of the problem concerned the bin for paper and magazine recycling which had never been emptied. I had been by-passing this difficulty by making use of another bin further along the road but, when I found last weekend that this alternative was now full so I couldn't use it, I decided to take matters into my own hands.  This afternoon I had the time and opportunity to empty the stinking bin and transfer the contents into a recently emptied general waste bin, thereby giving me the chance to empty my domestic waste-paper container into the right bin for the first time in over a year!  How long this pleasant state of affairs will continue is as yet unknown, of course.  Watch this space for news of further developments!