A Quarter of a Century

Happy 1984 Day

It is 1964 and in our little house in England we are saying goodbye to my mother’s lifelong friend and her husband. See you in 1984 the adults were saying. I did not get the joke about the year, but 1984 seemed far, far into the future. We were about to emigrate to Australia and the friends planned to visit us in 1984 when the husband retired.

Today is 1984 Day. George Orwell’s novel was published on 8th June 1949 and you can listen to it being read all day ( with breaks and different readers ) on BBC Radio 4. As you will have missed some by the time you read this, it is available on BBC Sounds. If you are elsewhere in the world I am not sure if you might come across it floating in the ether.

I first read 1984 in high school and by that time realised the year 1984 represented ‘the future’ or a future we hoped would not be realised. 1984 still seemed a long way off.

1984 came and went in a flurry of toddlers, nappies and ordinary life, though we paused to contemplate that the future had been and gone and we were having a better time than Winston Smith, well some of us. The next unimaginable future date was 2001, a new century and would it be like the Space Odyssey?

The new millennium started and we hurtled towards a quarter century without yet living on the moon. There is no longer a year number that represents the future. Has Orwell’s novel come true?

Big Brother, or at least someone is always watching. Not only are the final movements of missing people recorded on CCTV, but householders place cameras over their front door as easily as fitting a door bell. Police expect householders to hand over evidence and if you ring someone’s doorbell a disembodied voice will say ‘ Hi Joe you’re early, just walking the dog’ or ‘I’m in Scotland on holiday, can you leave the parcel with the neighbours.’

Thought police? We’ve created them ourselves, calling people out if they appear to be anti-something just because they expressed being in favour of someone or something else, or were overheard making a witty joke. In many countries of course, Thought Police are patrolling social media and journalism.

The 1984 holiday never happened. Mum’s friend’s husband had a degenerative condition that cancelled their holiday plans. You never know what’s going to happen in the future, except it inevitably becomes the past.

Advent Calendar – Thursday Seventeenth of December

Today is the 250th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, or at least the anniversary of the day he was baptised, but he has been celebrating all year; though like everyone else, he had to cancel all his live concerts and parties. So today’s window opens in Germany once more, to a very special Christmas performance and plenty of  Freude!

Freude! Freude! … Alle Menschen warden Brüder. / Joy! Joy! … All men shall become brothers.

On December 23rd 1989, only a month and a half after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leonard Bernstein led a concert in West Berlin. Two days later, on Christmas Day, he led an identical concert across the border, in what was previously East Germany. The music was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Ode to Joy was first written in 1785 by German poet Friedrich Schiller as a celebration of the brotherhood of man. Beethoven set the words for the final, choral movement of the Symphony completed in 1824. Having soloists and a choir burst into joyful singing in a symphony was revolutionary, but it has obviously stood the test of time.

Bernstein made one change for this two-concert series: he directed the choir to sing “Freiheit” (freedom) instead of “Freude” (joy).

4th Movement – part 2 – Ode to Freedom – 1989 – Leonard Bernstein – Beethoven’s 9th Symphony HD 720p – YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IciKr8NUmKs

The Ode to Joy is also the anthem of The European Union; an instrumental ( and much shorter ! ) version for a continent of many languages. Alas for British Remainers, this music is now a bitter reminder of the Brexit disaster and all that we are about to lose. Luckily Tidalscribe will be remaining in the European Union and adhering to Schiller and Beethoven’s optimism and belief in the brotherhood of man – brotherhood in the figurative inclusive sense .

European Union International Anthem – “Ode To Joy” (Instrumental) – YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ecrJaA_mXg

Advent Calendar – Wednesday Ninth of December

Today finds Elf in contemplative mood so the window opens in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge University; a place inextricably associated with Christmas. For over a hundred years A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols has been broadcast on the radio and more recently on television, from here to millions of people around the world.

King’s College Chapel | King’s College Cambridgehttps://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/chapel/

Listen to one of my favourite composers and one of my favourite singers. Fantasia On Christmas Carols by Ralph Vaughan Williams, sung by Roderick Williams.

Short Biography – Ralph Vaughan Williams Society (rvwsociety.com)https://rvwsociety.com/short-biography/

Ralph Vaughan Williams was a composer of great importance for English music. He was born on 12 October 1872 in a Cotswold village. At the turn of the century he was among the first to travel into the countryside to collect folk songs and carols from singers, notating them for future generations. He died on 26 August 1958; his ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey, near Purcell. In his long and very productive life music of every genre flowed in profusion.

佛漢威廉斯:聖誕頌幻想曲 Vaughan Williams: Fantasia On Christmas Carols – YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxgBirZx_VE

Youtube Nativity

Last century, in a previous incarnation, I went to mother and toddler groups; no doubt they have to be called something else now, Kids and Karers? We did have one granny, a few child minders and a couple of fathers. It was one of these fathers who brought his video camera along, no one else possessed such equipment. We thought he was showing off and hovering over his poor child. The ethos of the club was to ignore the little ones while indulging in a good gossip. These days he would probably have to have a background check before even being allowed into the church hall, let alone with a video camera. I wonder where that little boy is now, perhaps hot housed into a world leader, his whole life recorded for posterity.

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How would we all have fared, how different would our lives have been if we had grown up in the digital world, our pathetic appearance in the school nativity recorded and watched by grandchildren. I never got to be Mary or even an angel; in top infants I was merely the innkeeper’s wife with the line ‘Come this way.’ Would anyone want to see themselves coming last on sports day or dancing round the maypole in junior school? We did not get the ribbons tangled during our school’s centenary celebrations, but whether we looked elegant is another matter.

Our lives did not go completely unrecorded, Dad got a reel to reel tape recorder and secretly recorded Mum and the aunties, nobody could believe how awful their own voice sounded. When we had our school holiday in top juniors, several mothers went along as helpers, not mine thank goodness. One of these ladies had a cine camera, we were all going to be film stars. When it came time for the showing of the film, I did not appear at all.

There are families who have wonderful silent records of every Christmas, cine cameras were around for a long time before being superseded by videos, but most people took only photographs. Now every moment of a life can be recorded instantly, film or photo and broadcast to the world. Granddad on the other side of the world can see the new grandson having his umbilical cord cut. Great grandparents can see pretty in pink little miss precocious doing her first ballet exam at the age of two.

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But I feel more than a twinge of regret when I think of all the missed Instagrams I could have taken, pictures shared on Facebook and blogs written of my pre digital life. We have many photo albums, but camera film could not be wasted taking pictures of weird things; night scenes through rain splattered bus windows or the ubiquitous snaps of meals out or in.

Perhaps the more obsessed bloggers would have started much earlier if they had had the opportunity.

Baby Blogger…

Day One; with a bit of help from Mummy and Daddy I am starting this blog to record my whole life. Today was a bit of a milestone as I said my first words… blog, post and WordPress. Of course I know lots more words than that, but my lips and tongue aren’t working properly yet, just one of the challenges of being a baby.

Day Two; I have my first two followers, Mummy and Daddy… Sam the cat isn’t on WordPress so he can’t Like me, but here is a picture of him.

Day Three; We went to Wriggle and Rhyme Story Time at the library, I gave it four out of five stars…

 

My novel Quarter Acre Block is inspired by my early years.