Memory and Myth

  I don't have time to write at the moment. It's the first time that's happened to me in my life, and I don't like it.

 There's just no way around it. Caz, my wife, works early mornings, and I work late afternoons until midnight. We have one shared day off a week to do all the laundry, clean the house and so on. The rest of the time I'm either looking after the kids, at work, or trying like hell to get enough sleep to last through the next day. There's simply no time to write. Nothing. I could do five minutes here and there, but that's not enough to keep my head in the story. I'm hemmed in and can't find a way out.

 I can't write, but I can still think, and read, and I can still research.

 Currently I'm going through Hamlet's Mill, an essay on the importance of numbers in ancient myth. The thesis is that myths were stores for information, particularly on the stars. So if myths from Iran, Finland and Mexico all have a hero who rises to heaven without dying, and in all three cases makes his last journey with six companions and a dog, then there must be meaning behind it. For me, the most interesting thing is that the myths must all derive from a common source - an ancient culture that spanned the world. Or a group of such cultures, or maybe just survivors from civilisations that fell. We don't know the details, but there must have been someone watching the stars back then, during the last Ice Age maybe, ten thousand years before the first pharaohs.

 Whoever it was measured the movement of stars so accurately that they knew the Earth wobbles on its axis over a 26,000 year cycle. Impressive, eh? But they didn't mine coal, or gold, because we'd have found their pits if they did. They weren't industrial. Their culture was built on different values to ours. Maybe they thought in different ways. They may be as alien to us as dinosaurs.

 Isn't that interesting? My wife watches Black-ish, a show that makes it pretty clear that for all the progress society thinks it's made on civil and race rights, for black people the same issues still remain. As a white European man I can't really understand their experiences. So how am I supposed to comprehend a culture lost so long ago that the only relics we have are myths?

 Well, I can't do that, either. I can incorporate some of this into my work, whenever I can start working again. Meantime, this ancient culture seems to have flourished without writing anything down. They used memory and myth to record the things they thought were important. They kept every word in their minds, and still created tales that have lasted for thousands of years.

 In these days when I have so little time, that's an encouraging thought.

Back to the Light

 So, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, eh?

I’ve never liked the festive season. It’s too commercial and too forced. The adverts start much too early, and they’re all pressure sells - “buy this for Dad to make him happy.” Then it’s as though you have to smile, all the time. Not allowed to be down, not allowed to have a blue day. Stores play the same trite songs on a loop and we all have to wear jumpers that show we’re just such fun guys. It rings fake to me.

But now I have kids, things have changed (Like that’s a surprise). Christmas is for children, isn’t it? Bella’s of an age where she still prefers wrapping paper to presents, and plays for hours with the boxes, but still, she likes tearing the wrap off things. And she does like new toys, at least after she’s destroyed the boxes and strewn the house with cardboard. Besides, this will be Evie’s first Christmas. It doesn’t matter if I’m a grumpy old curmudgeon. It stopped being about me when the kids were born.

Christmas grew out of the pagan midwinter festival. I wonder if people then felt the same about that?

In some ways, patently not. The old festival was about emerging from the winter. The shortest day meant the year had turned, and now began to move towards spring and the rebirth of life. It was something to celebrate, but something dark too. The gods of rebirth used to die at midwinter, their blood on the snow, because they had to before being reborn in spring when the shoots start to grow. Darkness and light, a mixed message. Hope and despair.

 But faced with that, people focus on the hope. We always look for the light of a candle in the night. I can imagine those old festivals being full of life and joy, laughing in the face of the dark. What else were they for? We know the darkness is there, but we don't have to dwell on it. Better to raise a glass and smile.

 My wife wants us all to have onesies. I've always refused to wear the dreadful things. No force on Earth will get me into one of those things... except there are the kids. Caz says she can get minions onesies for her and the girls, and a Gru one for me. And take photos.

 The things we do for our kids.