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During the last three months when I wasn’t publishing anything new on here I was writing anyway. Because writing’s something I love doing and because I’d decided it was finally time to write a long and probably complex piece that would take a long and quiet time to get written. And I’ve done that now. A book called “Moments In Time.”
And I’ll be saying more about the book and why I’ve done it in a bit, but the main thing you need to know for now is that I’ve decided not to publish most of it. Just a few extracts, some of its moments if you like, beginning with these.
February 20th
Soon after my sixty ninth birthday, a month ago now, I collapsed in the middle of a Friday night and lost consciousness. Without warning and leaving no memory of my going down, I hit the bedroom floor and broke all the ribs on my left side. Some, I’d find out, in two places. A dangerous fall then and my first experience of what dying might be like. A good dying at that, one I wouldn’t have know about before oblivion or whatever might turn out to be next arrived.
But I didn’t die, obviously…
And was brought back to consciousness a few minutes later by my wife Sarah. Who was crouching anxiously over me, putting a pillow under my head and was on her phone to the hospital saying “Will the ambulance really take that long?” Well it didn’t take very long at all and inside an impressive twenty minutes a team of paramedics, all women, had carried some of their emergency kit up to our bedroom and got what would turn out to be three nights and days of testing and treatment going by being able to tell us I’d almost certainly not had a stroke or a heart attack.
What it probably was we’ll get to, but by the Monday evening Sarah had arrived at the Royal Hospital and brought me home, with all those broken ribs, to begin the slow healing and sat up sleeping that continues, along with more tests and monitoring back at the hospital over the next few weeks.
I’m grateful to be alive then, very, and to have experienced first hand the continuing brilliance of our under-pressure NHS. And how in a corner they’re still there for us all, cradle to grave like we were promised. Also though, what happened made me think. About mortality, as it would. But as well as that, a few days after I’d got home and was recovered enough to stop the morphine and resume thinking I thought “I’d better get on with it.”
“It” being the life story I’d been vaguely considering since the new year. Reasoning that with my seventies approaching I might be senior enough now to set something more permanent than a blog down in writing to leave behind me. A full-on looking back over what I’d done and learned from my whole life I thought. It’s ups, downs, warts and, perhaps, wisdoms. “A Version of a Life” I was going to call it. At least recognising it would only be my sometimes vaguely remembered version but feeling entitled and keen to write it anyway.
So, to clear room and time I stopped this Substack blog for a few months, and having done that set up a new Scrivener folder for what I could already tell was going to be a going backwards and forwards in time kind of thing, which would ideally fold into itself the “Summer Holiday” book I’d written last summer as well as several of the blog posts done since then.
At which point I lost heart…
And realised I didn’t want to set myself up for what was already feeling like a PhD’s-worth of trudging boredom ever again. So I ditched the idea of a full-on autobiography and decided on something much less complex. That I’d physically, with pens and in a book, write a follow-up volume to last year’s “Summer Holiday,” call it “Next Spring” and combine the pair of them into Books 1&2 of something to be called “Moments In Time.” Book 1 being things I thought about and did last summer, while our house was being restored, we were living in town and, as it turned out, I’d decided to leave University. Then Book 2 is what happens next. And you’re reading the beginning of that of now.
So not a detailed and chronological life story at all. I don’t have the patience or attention span for that, and guess you might not either. Nor will this contain the self-focussed truth-telling and accounts-settling that autobiographies too often wallow in. I won’t be analysing my childhood, the parenting I got or listing a catalogue of regrets and resentments. I can’t be doing with the likes of all them. Instead this is aimed at being a sketch, a collage let’s call it. Of a single year from my later life. The things that happened, the things I thought about, memories that turned up and loved ones I spent time with. To stand as a picture of who I’d once been. And that in its doing might help me think about the rest of my time on Earth and what I still might yet want to make of it.
So let’s get going.