Pensford Viaduct gets a re-point!

With thanks to BBC 'Points West' and Dom Lowe (Fair use)

BBC 'Points West' item.

https://www.facebook.com/561608916/videos/130904653376352/

The men who made industrial Britain.

Historic images of the construction of Pensford Viaduct (c.1870). (Credit Julia Baber whose Grandfather, Edward, is pictured with others)

What's on my mind, asks FaceBook. I reply, 'Ancestors as always' - those ephemeral shadows from the past, largely now just names and dates and places, with little to flesh out character or activity, let alone achievements, other than more names given to another generation. Of course dates and places and where appropriate occupations, afford context, from which we can infer things about the person, but they remain distant and indestinct. In the main we cannot see their faces, hear their voice, make judgments regarding their appearance, knowledge and outlook. Would they appear strange and alien? Would we have even liked or understood them? Now they are just marks on a piece of paper, names engraved on a stone but then they were living persons just as we are now, living day to day, in a far less forgiving protected world. As always we are reminded, that just as they have lost definition, so will we. That like them, everything we possess will be lost, all our achievements and emotions atomised and fogotten. That is the inevitable fate of our ancestors and ourselves. Our whole lives become the product of the jumble sale, charity shop and auction, possessions disseminated to the four corners of the globe without pedigree or provenance. Achievements illusionary. Concerns transient and no longer of any significance. We worry and strive all to non-effect. We return from whence we came and leave little trace apart from perhaps a few tantalising details. That is what ancesters teach us, what we if we have any sense will teach those that come after. We are but a temporary home for the spiritual being that resides there, returning to whence it came, from a brief interaction with matter. We follow into the unknown, those that have gone before, without whom we would not exist - our ancestors. 'Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn, but with the going down of the sun, we ought to remember them.'

17.8.2023: I had an ambivalent attitude to books as a kid. I actively avoided reading and regarded it largely as a chore. I think girls are naturally better at it than boys. I was weaned on bible and cowboys! No wonder it drove me crazy. There were set books at school but I'm not sure I read them through. A few grabbed me though, such as the 'Cruel Sea', an account 2nd WW convoys. And this I think is the secret behind getting children to read for themselves - engaging the imagination. Once that occurs, there's stopping the urge to consume books - essentially the transfer of one person's mind to another's. In fact a rather remarkable and miraculous process. Although I caught on to reading as an adult, and now feel almost destitute if I do not have one on the go (currently Balzak's 'Thirteen' about 1830's Paris), you never really catch up on those lost years. Childhood reading is not only an exercise in psychological escapism and learning facts, but is also invisibly laying down those amazing and still little understood neural pathways that stand us in good stead for the rest of our lives. Words are a form of hieroglyphics, each and every one representing images and concepts in the brain. The quality of the image depends on the depth and breadth of the knowledge attached to it. The more we read, the more we learn, the more expansive our appreciation of this brief period of sentience hopefully becomes.

18.8.2023. Amazing what you come across when you do a quick search of newspaper records from the nineteen seventies. Up pops my letters to the Evening Post about the railway line, Elm trees and the PPA. Me as a 'Best Man' at a Frome wedding and then lots of refences to brother and cousins that take you back. Deaths of uncles and a great uncle who was a soldier in the First WW, relations' business adverts, notable local goal scorers. Can you hear the cheers? Then from 1924, I learn my grandfather Arthur, gave up his role as Pensford Church Warden, after holding it for thirteen years, to be replaced by 'Olly' Batten of fond memory. Well I think it was Olly or maybe his father. I couldn't see the whole article. In 1924 my dad would have been fifteen and probably just coming up to leaving Redcliffe School and a working life in and around the village.