A Weekend of Celebration

Well, it's arrived at last!  It seems the whole country has been planning for it for ages, and now it's finally here ... the Platinum Jubilee.  This thought isn't my own, and I confess that it hadn't dawned on me until someone pointed out, just a day or two ago, the confusion over what it is we're actually celebrating.  Thursday 2nd June was actually the 69th anniversary, not the 70th, of the queen's coronation.  But let's not throw too big a damper on proceedings.  She has been our queen for seventy years: the 70th anniversary of that was back in February ... but who wants to celebrate in the middle of winter?

And what a remarkable achievement.  Only a small proportion of our population has been alive other than during her reign, and to have any credible recollection of life under the reign of her father, you have to be at least 75 years old.  As I've often quipped, I may be old enough to have had a ration book, but I'm not old enough to have known that I had one.

A characteristic of many public gatherings and celebrations this weekend will be portrayals, illustrations and photographs of many different aspects of our lives as they have changed over the last seventy years.  So many things that were commonplace at the time of the coronation have now long since disappeared and been forgotten, while others that we take for granted today were not even dreamed about then ... at least not beyond the realms of science fiction.

Many, like me, will find their own memories being nudged back to childhood as they recollect times of long ago, faces of the past, former generations who haven't been part of family gatherings for many a decade.  For some, these journeys into nostalgia will be comfortable, an opportunity to enjoy once more the happiness of a past life.  For others, however, they will bring back the horrors of war, loneliness, loss and pain from which the comforts of modern living had brought some relief, and they will long for all the fuss to be over and for normal, modern life to return.

This week I have been working with Genesis.  I knew that it was Genesis because there were fifty chapters of it, and that was the name of the computer files.  Moment by moment, as words in a foreign language passed to and fro across my screen, they could have been anything.  My only concern was that what was in one window was the same as what was in the other.  Working from an original where the verse numbers are in the margin, one person's interpretation of where the verse actually ends sometimes differs from another's.  At these points, I had to call upon an English version to adjudicate,  comparing the 'shape' of the familiar text and its numbered verses to the original I was working with.

It was at those moments that I got a glimpse of the 'story', and was reminded that this was, indeed, Genesis.  Those fifty chapters cover a vast span of history, from creation itself, to Noah and the flood, and to the story of four generations of Abraham's family, ending with Joseph and his brothers in Egypt.  Compared to that, this week's celebrations, and the seventy years over which we're looking back, pale into insignificance.

It's often easier to think about things that are familiar, than to strain one's imagination with the concept of centuries of development.  So, on these momentous occasions, we recall our own families, grandparents perhaps, but little further than that. In the same way, I found a comfortable familiarity in the closing bits of Genesis: in particular the bit where Joseph brought his sons to his father Jacob for a blessing.  Joseph noticed that the boys were the wrong way round, and made to reverse them, but Jacob persisted,  I wonder whether Jacob was looking back to his own childhood and the way his own and his brother's fortunes had been reversed.

This weekend, I think back to my own grandparents, in their old age, when my mother used regularly to take me to their home, and I wonder what they thought of this six- or seven-year-old.  Did they question, perhaps, what I would grow into long after they'd passed on?