Friday, March 31, 2006

Who Wants to be Ruth Lawrence?

Now if you could go back and redo some things, how far would it have to be? A certain amount of nostalgia has been bouncing around in my head recently which inevitably leads on to one or two moments I would rather forget. Any desire for an ability to undo things is really a request to erase the memory of certain things rather than to go back and actually undo them. The complexity of life and physics actually means that expunging even the most trivial of red-face moments has the potential to completely change a life. I regret not spending more time reading classic books when I was a lot younger. All that time spent out playing in streams, crawling along tunnels or climbing trees could have used for improvement. I have memories lit by flashes of lightning where I sit in some sunny, sixties library, turning the huge pages of art books and making copies of the pictures I like. I wasn’t the sportiest child at that age anyway but I did “get out” and come home to the lectures about how filthy I was. (The detergent companies seem to have realised that these dressing-downs are the enemy of sales and have succeeded in making such terrible behaviour completely acceptable – and well done I say). What would I be now had I concentrated on books and stayed in? I’m not sure I would have become a high-flyer – that takes super-intelligence and focus as well – just a prig (good Arthur Ransome type word).

All this noodling is pointless really. I am talking about personal things. Stephen fry makes the same point on a much bigger scale in Making History but although I enjoyed this, looking back it seems to be too sweeping in its affects. I suppose that even a tiny personal change to one’s life has the potential to bring down governments. Reading about the turbulent history of Europe in The Devil’s Doctor with its running them of apocalyptic change, I was struck with how sane things have become since then. We are so far removed in outlook and behaviour from the fear of sudden death through either illness or recalcitrance, that the fact that we are descended from these decapitators and burners and separated by only 400 years is quite sobering. Then again some of the perpetrators of the most recent European evil-doings are still alive – still young and having children. I have rambled but the point I wanted to make was that we can often think that the end of the World is imminent and then it all goes right and things settle down. Conversely, maybe some tiny event that seems trivial at the time will bring us to planetary obliteration in a second. I am thinking of the unlikely creation of a black hole in the lab maybe.

Strangely I am reminded of the profile of Allan Ahlberg that was on the Culture Show last night. He and his wife produced a wonderful picture book called Peepo! which details the world through the eyes of a small child. It is a cosy world of happy confusion and cheeky sisters. A first reading has you thinking how wonderful it all is. However a careful examination of the pictures shows you that it is set in wartime - the gas-masks, the Spitfires over the houses, the barrage balloons in the distance. The baby’s father is in fatigues and I always thought he was off to Home Guard duty but Ahlberg said last night that he was off back to the army which makes it so much more poignant. The baby is of course Ahlberg himself. No matter that the worst war ever is going on – the comfort of real people and the ceaseless blurring of both embarrassments and apocalypses keeps us from complete break down.

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