Past Lives
Here we are at the end of another week.
Strange how a week or a month can go by, and nothing really seems that different, we don't look any different, and may do the same things. World turns, we go to bed, get up and go about our daily lives. Looking imperceptibly different to how we did a day, week, or even month ago.
Yet, change, surely we must do, none of us were here 100 years ago, there were all different people living in Bicester then, living completely different lives.
As I walk through the churchyard each morning taking Ollie to school I glance at the gravestones and wonder about the people that they were. A man who died in 1870, in middle age. Just a name on a stone. Could anyone even tell me who he was, and what he did? No mobile phones, TV, or any mod cons like we have. What was his life like I wonder?
You see they are not just names on stones, they were people who loved, lost, felt intense emotions from the most soaring heights of love to the desperate lows of rejection, jealousy and despair. How I wish I could really take a Tardis back in time and see what his life was like.
You see all you ever really learn about history at school, on TV, when you visit an historic site, is about battles, Kings and Queens, inventions, political developments.
I have never been interested much in all of that, much as I am not interested very much today in what's going on in the wider world, trouble in the middle east, or wherever. No I want to know what really happened in these people's lives. When the Doctor goes back in the Tardis, he meets Queen Victoria, Shakespeare, Dickens, you name it.
I'm really not interested in them. Their lives have been well documented. I want to know how the ordinary people lived. I want to go back and see who was living in my house (19th century built) back in the 1890s. I want to see how they lived their lives. I can't get that from books and I can't get that from TV. Look at Lark Rise To Candleford - was that really an accurate representation? Where everyone was wearing immaculate period dress, and the sun always shone? Not real to me - just an idyllic portrait of how we would imagine life used to be.
What did real people do in the evenings? Was it the close knit family unit they we always are led to believe or were the people subject to all the same emotions and traumas of us. Did my friends under the stones in the churchyard all feel the passions that I have felt? Did they suffer all those bittersweet emotions of lost love, unrequited love, the pain of losing a loved one. Was it like today? I have heard it said that because infant mortality was so high that when a child died at a very young age, they just shrugged it off and had another one. I cannot personally believe that. Whether you lived in 2012 or in 1862 I cannot believe that pain could have been any the less, just because it's something that happened all the time.
I so wish I could go back and see.
If you have enjoyed reading this blog, please take a look at my books on Amazon (Paperback & Kindle), where you can read lots more of the same! Click here.
Jason xx
Strange how a week or a month can go by, and nothing really seems that different, we don't look any different, and may do the same things. World turns, we go to bed, get up and go about our daily lives. Looking imperceptibly different to how we did a day, week, or even month ago.
Yet, change, surely we must do, none of us were here 100 years ago, there were all different people living in Bicester then, living completely different lives.
As I walk through the churchyard each morning taking Ollie to school I glance at the gravestones and wonder about the people that they were. A man who died in 1870, in middle age. Just a name on a stone. Could anyone even tell me who he was, and what he did? No mobile phones, TV, or any mod cons like we have. What was his life like I wonder?
You see they are not just names on stones, they were people who loved, lost, felt intense emotions from the most soaring heights of love to the desperate lows of rejection, jealousy and despair. How I wish I could really take a Tardis back in time and see what his life was like.
You see all you ever really learn about history at school, on TV, when you visit an historic site, is about battles, Kings and Queens, inventions, political developments.
I have never been interested much in all of that, much as I am not interested very much today in what's going on in the wider world, trouble in the middle east, or wherever. No I want to know what really happened in these people's lives. When the Doctor goes back in the Tardis, he meets Queen Victoria, Shakespeare, Dickens, you name it.
I'm really not interested in them. Their lives have been well documented. I want to know how the ordinary people lived. I want to go back and see who was living in my house (19th century built) back in the 1890s. I want to see how they lived their lives. I can't get that from books and I can't get that from TV. Look at Lark Rise To Candleford - was that really an accurate representation? Where everyone was wearing immaculate period dress, and the sun always shone? Not real to me - just an idyllic portrait of how we would imagine life used to be.
| Lark Rise To Candleford - just a little too perfect in my view. |
What did real people do in the evenings? Was it the close knit family unit they we always are led to believe or were the people subject to all the same emotions and traumas of us. Did my friends under the stones in the churchyard all feel the passions that I have felt? Did they suffer all those bittersweet emotions of lost love, unrequited love, the pain of losing a loved one. Was it like today? I have heard it said that because infant mortality was so high that when a child died at a very young age, they just shrugged it off and had another one. I cannot personally believe that. Whether you lived in 2012 or in 1862 I cannot believe that pain could have been any the less, just because it's something that happened all the time.
I so wish I could go back and see.
If you have enjoyed reading this blog, please take a look at my books on Amazon (Paperback & Kindle), where you can read lots more of the same! Click here.
Jason xx
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