dailyprompt-2105

What historical event fascinates you the most?

Daily writing prompt
What historical event fascinates you the most?
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What historical event fascinates you the most?

First, let us define ‘historical’. Here’s what I found – (1) of or concerning history. (2) concerning past events. (3) The historical background to such studies. (4) Belonging to the past, not the present. (5) Famous historical figures.

Now let us think of the number of times we hear on the TV sports shows that such and such an event is making history “right before our eyes”. Wow! In a boxing match, almost ever punch thrown is “an historical event”. Ditto rugby – with every try scored, every penalty missed, and every tackle made. Ditto soccer, basketball, baseball, athletics. So, from the battery of past events that adorn my life, I am being asked to choose “which historical event fascinates me most”. Double wow.

My answer – the day of my birth, about which I know absolutely nothing. Or, to be more specific, the actual action of being born, about which I know even less. So, how do I study the historical background, when no eye witnesses are left alive to assist me? More important, nobody in my family wanted to talk about such an important – for me at any rate – event.

I do have some factual memories – tales told to me later. I was born at exactly 8:00 pm. I know this because my parents’ dog had been left at a neighbor’s house while my home-birth was taking place. As the clock struck eight, Paddy, the dog, jumped straight through their window, and ran up the road towards the house that was now to be our house, barking. “Ah,” said our wise neighbor, “there goes the dog. That means the baby’s been born.”

That is one version of the tale. My own version is the squawking of the stork who carried me, a sudden screech as he dropped me, a slow descent from a bright blue sky, a tumble down the chimney into the fireplace. And there I was. All covered in soot and ashes. I needed washing, of course. But baby, just look at me now. [See self-portrait above – Face in a Mirror].

My maternal grandfather swore that I had not been born at all, but found under a gooseberry bush. That would account for the green tinges in the painting. Apparently, all babies in South Wales were found under gooseberry bushes at that time. Unless they were delivered by the milkman.

And there’s many a tale about merry milkmen for, as they say in Wales, “It’s a wise man who knows his own father.” And I guess that is also a hysterical historical event about which I know nothing. But perhaps that’s why when the milkman who delivered the morning milk used to say “Good morning, son” when I met him at the the doorstep.

Come to think of it, the mailman also used to call me “Son” when he delivered the mail. Hmmmm – so did the butcher, the baker, and the candle-stick maker. Oh dear, so many historical events to choose from.

What’s something you believe everyone should know.

Daily writing prompt
What’s something you believe everyone should know.
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What’s something you believe everyone should know.

I think everyone should know that the world, as we see it right now, is a very troubled and troubling place. Everyone should also know that there is no so-called “silver bullet”, no single answer that will solve everything with the wave of a magic wand.

These two points are tied in to a third – that the world is filled with smoke and smoke screens. Misinformation, disinformation, manipulation, lies, downright lies, and AI statistics now rule. There is no longer a clear pathway to follow and there is so much downright tribalism and hatred that there are few safe places, save in the middle of a person’s own little tribe that protects while allowing no challenges to whatever truths their authorities present as being true.

Voltaire once persuaded Candide to say that “everything is for the best in the best of all worlds.” Personally, I wish those words were true. It is equally false to say that “everything is for the worst in the worst of all worlds.”

As I type these words, the first snow of winter is falling outside my window. It covers my garden with a thin, white blanket, soft, and fluffy, and wet. All the flaws of my late fall lawn are covered up, tucked away, lie buried beneath that blank sheet on which neither animal, nor beast, nor bird has yet set foot.

I imagine it as a clean page, a fresh beginning, a new start, a moment when the world can change and a new future history can be written starting now. I do not smoke, so pipe dreams are something I have not experienced. Alas, I fear that such a dream is nothing but a pipe-dream, a castle in the clouds, a chateau in Spain, as some say.

“Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, over and over, and over again. Then the snow settles. The winners write their stories on blank pages. The losers all disappear into the mists of time. But those mists contain the ghosts, and the myths, and the fairy-tales, that turn themselves into truths reborn, and the same merciless battles begin again.

Then the snow of memory loss starts to fall and the world is presented with another blank page on which to write. Alas, instead of a new future history, the old stories, the old myths, the old falsehoods emerge once more from the miasma and the world again becomes a very troubled and troubling place, and so it goes on, secula seculorum, for ever and ever, amen.