17 of 50

We’ve all been there. You’re cast as; a King, a Republican, a Prime Minister, a Shepherd, Jesus, Mary, Joseph or the wee donkey. It’s either the school play, nativity performance or some other “production”. You rehearse for what seems like months, and then the great and the good – your parents, other relatives, school governors and the local vicar come along and watch your performance.

I think I have a particularly impressive list of characters that I’ve played:

Second Shepherd,

Slim the Cowboy (brilliant gambler, terrible pistol shot),

Oliver Cromwell,

Part of The Dragon (slain),

A rabbit.

Despite these successes I retired from acting at an early point in my career. Instead preferring the lure of outdoor life. Looking back I wonder if I made the right decision. If I hadn’t maybe I could have stayed the course, gone to Hollywood, who knows. I’m pretty sure though that I made the right decision.

To this day I can remember the line that I had to be prompted about in every dress rehearsal and performance when I played Slim the Cowboy – “But that’ll mean going all the way back to Sacramento again.” I can’t remember the context for it but despite not being able to remember it at the time I can remember it to this day, and it’s the only line I can remember from that play, from any of the plays.

Since my retirement I have kept my finger on the pulse of the up and coming actors. As a school governor I have attended a number of productions, and recognise myself in today’s aspiring actors. There seems to be a wider range of productions these days, although the old stalwart of nativity play still seems to be very popular.

They are of course there to serve and educational purpose, as well as entertain the legions of parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles who come along to suffer through watch the performances. To transmit wider messages of good will, hope and happiness. I suspect that today they are an institution in schools throughout the land, like the school fete, carol concert and a wealth of other activities that make up the school year that are outside the straight lessons in classrooms that most people instantly associate with “being at school”.

So did you act when at school? If so who did you play? Or are you an actor today because of starting out at school? I’d love to know, leave me a comment.

Thanks for reading.

16 of 50

We’d slogged our way up a very clear steep path to the summit. We could see that there was a flagpole there and as we cleared the crest a memorial and a couple of benches positioned to allow a seated person a spectacular view.

As we stood catching our breath we could see that seated on one of the said benches was a little old lady. This caused something of a double-take. We’d been pretty hard pressed to clamber up the slope; there was no way that she’d managed the same feat with her walking stick. We figured we’d been had, and that there was another way to the summit that was less arduous. A little scouting around revealed that there was indeed a much shallower path, an indirect route that lead around the sides of peak but achieved the same ends. We went down that way.

This was on the first day of a family holiday in a little Wiltshire village where we’d gone to stay for a week. We’d been gifted a week in October in a neighbours’ holiday cottage on the condition that we closed down the cottage for the winter. Ultimately we did this a number of times over several years, and this became a regular family escape.

It was a little village with good access to the Wiltshire Downs, a good selection of small shops – newsagent, green grocer, butcher, general store, electrical store, small garage/petrol station, a chippy, and to my absolute delight a secondhand bookshop. I got to know the owner of the latter very well over the years, and although the shop is gone now I still own a few of the books that I purchased there.

In later years it became a stopping point on holidays to the West Country and Cornwall and immediately prior to Covid I visited again a number of times on the way to and from a client in the neighbouring county. There’s now a charity shop near to the old bookshop, with a good collection of secondhand books and I’ve also found a number of treasures in there. Some of the other shops have gone, as has the petrol station but many remain to this day and whilst many things have changed, it’s still very much the same village of my childhood and still appears to be a thriving community, even holding a literary festival in the autumn.

This village still holds a favourite place in my heart. I haven’t had the opportunity to visit since early 2020, so I do wonder how things have changed if at all in the last couple of years with the implications of Covid.

Once upon a time we looked at a possible house move there and at one point had a property in mind, but that didn’t work out and plans changed. I doubt that we will ever do that now, but it is a place that will be an anchor point in my life. One of only happy memories (I’m sure there were somethings that I’ve probably chosen not to remember) and some unfulfilled things, but still….

One that I am determined to complete at some point is to climb to the top of another nearby monument. This one is manmade and stands not far from this little village. Over the years, those family holidays and other visits, I’ve been there a number of times to climb to it’s summit. Although generally open to the public at certain times, each time I’ve tried it’s been closed for an unusual reason. It does seem a little like fate conspiring against me but one day.

15 of 50

In some ways this newsletter is a little bit of a journal and diary. It is afterall reflections from the past 50 years. I’ve kept a “diary” in one form or another since I was quite young. I started it after reading the The Ghost of Thomas Kempe by Penelope Lively. The “hero” of the story is James Harrison who as well as unwittingly releasing the poltergeist of the title also keeps a “personal notebook”. In it he records such things as ‘financial situation’, ‘weather’, ‘food’, and ‘future plans’. My young brain at the time obviously thought that keeping a similar record would be a good idea, and well it stuck for over 40 years.

Now many of the early volumes of mine are thankfully lost, just as well I suspect. I don’t remember what I’d written but I suspect it probably wasn’t the sort of thing that I’d want to read again or for anyone else to for that matter. The emotional outpourings of a teenager are probably never great and maybe just better confined to a silent log.

I do have most of the more recent ones though. The really recent ones are to hand and others are in a box in the loft.

They come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

I generally, but not always, write in fountain pen these days but don’t always stick to that. I’ll use whatever notebook I fancy or have to hand when I’m starting the next new one. I generally fill each one before moving on to a new one, unless they get damaged in some way. One or two have succumbed to coffee or ink spillages over the years and have been retired from service early as a result. I write something most days even if it’s just a log and other days I’ll write quite a bit more. I might use a specific book for a particular period, like a holiday rather than risk losing a more comprehensive volume while travelling (there aren’t any recent volumes of those mind you).

I rarely seem to go back and look through them though. I did recently review those notes from the period of the first covid lockdown in 2020. A year on I got those notebooks out to a weird sense of deja-vu as if things hadn’t really changed all that much. (I’m thinking of doing the same thing again this year and looking back over the past two years).

So far I haven’t used them as source material for any of these posts and I’m not sure whether I will. I have quite a list of things that I could write newsletters about even before going to look at other material. Then again, maybe there are some good things in them that I have forgotten – who knows?

In some ways they are old friends, or places where I’ve done some thinking about something that was troubling me or I needed to work out my thoughts on a particular topic. Some tend to be more work related and others more personal. For this reason I generally have more than one volume on the go at any one time.

They are a record of my life but not one that I ever expect anyone to ever read, and although I’ve never thought about what I’d want to happen to them when I’m gone, I don’t imagine anyone doing anything more than consigning them to the recycling. That said, I do enjoy reading other people’s diaries, at least those that are published as such to be read, although I suspect some were similarly never intended to be read in that way. Did Thomas Merton or John Muir think that someone would posthumously take their diaries and publish them for the world to read? I’m glad they did, but I doubt that perhaps was ever their intention when committing pen to paper.

These words here are those that I choose to share, but there are many pages in my diaries even to this day that I probably wouldn’t. Then when I’m gone what do I care?

14 of 50

“Be Prepared” – the motto of the scouting movement is as a pretty good place to start now as it was back when I was 9 or 10 years old. I never wanted to be a Cub until I was one and then I’m not sure that I really wanted to leave. I think in part that was to do with the inspirational “adults” that ran the pack I was a member of and that the learning we were doing was always fun. Looking back I’m sure that I learnt just as much messing about at camps, in the woods and in the village hall on a Monday evening than I did at school at the same time.

We went on Summer camps to all sorts of places with side trips at weekends to London and other places that were of interest. These were always more than just places to go. Whilst we might take a tour of London at night to see the lights of Piccadilly Circus or visit HMS Belfast on The Thames, we’d also do the more wacky things like going and standing in the middle of Tower Bridge with a foot on each side of the bridge split waiting for a routemaster bus to go by so that we could feel the bridge roadway move, and hope that they didn’t pick that moment to open the bridge to let a large vessel pass underneath.

I’m not sure how scouting has changed today I suspect with safeguarding and health and safety it might not be quite the same – not that that’s a bad thing – but I think we were probably generally safer then than now, which is a bit of an indictment on the modern world. We all had our share of grazed knees, cuts and bruises and I’ve still got a couple of scars that were as a result of things that ‘happened at Cubs’.

Regardless of those changes I still do some things today in a certain way that I learnt at Cubs; lighting a campfire, making a bed, using a map and compass and many more. Those lessons are hard-wired into my brain, because they were taught in a fun way rather than through a strict academic approach.

Thanks for reading.

Were you ever a Cub, Scout, Brownie, Guide or something similar ? What do you remember of those experiences? Leave me a comment, I’d love to know.

13 of 50

Some of my friends are made from paper and contain a magical ingredient. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t name all of them but many hold a special place or memory.

One of the things I wanted to make sure I did this year was revisit some of those old friends. A few are numbers in my list of 50 posts, so I’ll also get to talk about them as and when I get to those numbers.

One in particular I’m keen to get to is J.R.R Tolkein’s The Hobbit. I reckon I was around 9 or 10 when I first read this book.

At our school we had a library where we could ‘check-out’ books and take them home to read. We were only allowed one book at a time as the library was relatively small, but one summer over the long six week holiday I managed to check out The Hobbit, and because of the holiday I had it for the full six weeks.

I used to stay in bed in the mornings and read. Sometimes a few pages and sometimes a chapter. I’d savoured it, and it was like it is for many people, my gateway drug to the world of Middle Earth, The Lord of the Rings and all the associated tales and stories.

It didn’t make me a big reader of fantasy but I do have a small collection of Tolkein books. Strangely though I haven’t reread The Hobbit for what feels like a long time. I have a battered old paperback copy but to treat myself for my birthday I bought a copy as close to the that original ‘school’ version as I could find. It’s quite a beautiful thing with colour plate and black and white illustrations drawn by Tolkein and hardbound with a paper dust jacket.

I’m also waiting for the warmer summer days and my plan is to try and read it the same way if I can, or at least on a few occasions. I might have to forego the staying in bed reading as I’m not sure the dogs will let me get away with that but perhaps sitting in the garden after a dog walk with a coffee for an hour before I start my working day?

I’m guessing that all sounds quite elaborate, but I think there is something to rekindling the memories of reading the book that is more than just the words on the page. If you think for a moment about a favourite book, I’m pretty sure you’d be able to tell me a story about what was happening in your life at the time you were reading it. I know I can do this for quite a few of my favourites, and I think that perhaps your subconscious captures this as much as anything else.

Perhaps if you too have a similar story about a book that you loved you’d like to share it in the comments? I’d be interested to read about the books that have touched you and the backstory that goes with them.

Thanks for reading.