Throwing Away

 Dear Reader,

From now on every Sunday when I write this blog I will put a photograph or two at the top of the page,and it will partner the poem at the bottom in case you were wondering what the photographs  were all about. 

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A very old friend, Catherine Addison, has just written her memoirs so that her family will know about her life and her life's work, with stories of all the relatives they share.  It is an amazing book, full of interest and would be interesting to the public I am sure, should they have the opportunity to read it. I must say I couldn't put it down and last night I dreamt of the small village in Scotland she wrote about where she and her husband went to fish every year .  

But Catherine and I had a few blank years when we didn't see each other and I knew next to nothing about her or her life.  And having read the book I am so sad that this was the case.  She worked for the British Travel Association  in London where her role was to work with, and through, the overseas media at the start of a huge growth in overseas visitor numbers. In 1998 she was awarded the MBE for services to tourism.

The point of this story about someone you don't know is that my thought run like this:  we know very little about each other, either old friends or new ones.  People simply are not interested in other people's lives, unless perhaps it is a new romance, and then only in a cursory way.  I have lived here in this Cotswold small town for twenty years and could count on my left hand how many questions I have ever been asked about my life, either in Oxford or elsewhere. 

I must be guilty of this lapse myself, this lack of curiosity for the people I have met, but I do try to ask questions and find most people love to tell me about themselves.  Perhaps more people should write of their life's adventures to share with friends who would be entertained by them, maybe show a part of themselves until then unknown.

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From Jane Austen, 1801, in Hampshire

'How do you like this cold weather?  I hope you have all been earnestly praying for it as a salutary relief from the dreadfully mild and unhealthy season preceding it, fancying yourself half purified from the want of it, and that you now all draw into the fire, complain that you never felt such bitterness of cold before, that you are half starved, quite frozen, and wish the mild weather back again with all your hearts'.

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Throwing Away

the letters,
those billets doux,
the photographs,
the dance programmes,
the theatre tickets,
the postcards,
is a formidable task,
and weeping is not forbidden.

Before discarding
these once precious things,
the proof of special moments
lived in earlier times,
memorize them all with care.
And afterwards, relive
this solitary, remembered road,
and weeping is not forbidden.

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With very best wishes, Patricia