It was a frosty morning at the end of January 2012.  An old man sat comfortably in his house, with a mug of tea in his hand.  As he looked out over the white roofs of the houses nearby, he thought about how many mornings he had experienced in his life so far.  A rough calculation showed that the number had already passed thirty thousand.  He was relieved that he did not have detailed memories of all these mornings, but he knew that they had all happened, and that the events of the thirty thousand days that followed them had been woven into the tapestry of his life.

What was his earliest memory?  He had seen photographs of himself as a toddler, including one taken in a photographer’s studio where he was standing with his hands on a small stool, possibly because he would have fallen over without its support.  He was warmly dressed in a fluffy woollen coat and hat, corduroy leggings, and thick mitts.  He had no memory of the photograph being taken, but he had no doubt that he had been in that studio and that this picture was evidence of a day in his life that had probably been as frosty as today was.

In 1930 I was the toddler in that photograph, wondering what the photographer was doing.  In 2012 I was the old man with the mug of tea, thinking about my past life, more than eighty years long so far.

As I rack my brain to recall early memories I remember something that happened when I was about three years old.  My uncle James, my father’s brother, had been showing me how to produce the domino effect, setting up a row of wooden bricks on their narrow edges so that when the first one was tapped to make it fall over it knocked over the rest of the row.  I have a definite memory of that event, and can almost hear again the clatter of the bricks as they tumbled down in a long line.  But it’s only a partial memory and I cannot visualise the room where it happened.  My uncle died on 9 May 1932, aged 35, ten days after my third birthday.

In writing this blog I want to explore some of the ways in which my life has developed.  In particular, I should like to review those times when I made choices that had significant consequences for me and for other people.  I believe that I’m accountable for my actions, in this life to my family and to society at large, and beyond this life to my creator.

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, lived with my parents from their marriage in 1926 for the remaining seventeen years of her life.  She died in 1943, when I was fourteen.  Among other memories that I have are those of her sitting quietly in her room reading from a large-print Bible.  Was she swotting for her finals?