Abt 20 years ago..? 17 1 7 (8) 25 2 20

Keeping my head to the grind once more I have been spending much of my free time this first week of the new year editing my digital pictures for my next on-line photo album which if it sees the light of day will be my 6th and will cover the period from March 2008 until who knows when, perhaps until September or October of the same year for there was still much going on in my life that year, the year I finally retired..?

It's an activity which is gradually taking a hold of my imagination for during the past 4 days I have done little else. Yesterday for example I ran across the first pics I ever took of my two grandsons A and D taking to sail and the sea in my small yacht, M, of 24 feet in length, together with O my long term sailing partner. At the time in the summer of ‘08 they were respectively 9 and 7 y old and we hadn't gone more than the odd ½ sea mile before A was instructing his younger brother D which way to pull the tiller, this way or that, to head M's nose up to port or up to starboard..?

You see scattered among the digital pics are these short video clips I also took at the time and nothing could bring these moments more vividly to life than a video clip complete with sound... At other times I would normally never visit these archives and as I have said on numerous occasions at that time I was taking much more medication in the years immediately following my heart attack so that now I think some of it affected my cognitive function in a negative way: like the use of statins which a number of years ago the Food and Drug Administration of the United States issued a warning to say the use of statins could lead to loss of short-term memory which I heeded with what I believe to be a subsequent improvement in my memory function...   

Well it has also been an opportunity for me to edit all my pics and vids and what has been surprising has been the repetition and on occasion a lack of chronology so that also yesterday whilst selecting pics for this 6^th album I ran across these other vids of myself from 4^th Dec 2004 in short clips perhaps ½ dozen in number of what in the vids I described as self-portraits. Taking them in chronological order the very first vid told me I had been consuming liquor and very quickly I formed the opinion I should trash them all, but before doing so I jumped from one to other dipping into them briefly as it were to get a flavour for their overall content, when to my surprise I ended up by phoning my elder son S to discuss the matter with him, when he persuaded me I should leave them on file for him one day to decide their fate.

The thing about this experience: as if one is getting to meet the person who in fact is one’s self but from a significantly earlier age is the enormous difference in outlook for the person then compared to the person now: then aged 65 I had just a week or so earlier retired for the first time and was speculating about a further 6 months employment as a Consultant, whilst in reality I worked another 4 years before retiring for good. And the fact that the year in question was the same year my mother died at almost 91 years of age, followed 6 months later by the death of my younger son’s father-in-law, aged 72, who lived in the same town as the one in which we live and so both people very close and dear to me… which is apparent to a high degree in the monologues referred to… Against the broader background of spending a leisurely Saturday afternoon visiting Sauna, hence the can of beer whilst my wife, A-E, was out doing the week-end shopping in good time for the annual dinner-dance the company in which I worked had arranged for the forthcoming evening, and which I speculated would probably be the last such occasion for us… But it was 2002 when my heart attack struck and 2 years earlier I had had my bypass surgery which I discussed in one of the vids in terms of my life no longer being that of someone who considers himself to be immortal, as a much younger man might: and when one’s whole family was at that time so much younger, sons and their spouses and of course their two children each: perhaps describing a person with a much freer attitude to life as a 65 year old than the more serious person now at 77 hahaha. Have a good continuation to the new year everyone and why not make the odd self-portrait yourself sometime for your perusal in say 12+ years from now..?    
Re-counting my very different life of 12 years ago..? 17 1 7