Practical Thoughts

  Dear Reader, In these COVID times, I don't always find it easy to remain 'above it all'. Trying to remain as focused as I would like is a job in itself, sometimes. However, while busying myself on something creative the other day about family history, I was trying to think of what my family was really all about: what were (I pondered) its major characteristics. Well I considered the striving aspect in the family - no-one sat around doing nothing, that's for sure. And I considered the craftsmanship element of what had been handed down, particularly the advice not to blame one's own tools when things go wrong. My own experience transformed this advice into not to blame others for what goes wrong. How then, I thought, do I translate all that into something succinct and which could act as an instant reminder when seeking inspiration? What emerged from that contemplation was that an answer lies in heraldry! I had forgotten that part of the purpose of a coat of arms is

  Dear Reader, Everything is constantly changing, whether we realise it or not, though only those who have lived at least 70 years will be all too aware of how much has materially and socially changed in such a short space of time. The amount of change in the last 70 years is surely unprecedented in human history. In the way we lived back in the days post-WW2, there was considerably more neighbourliness, though perhaps that consciousness has been returning in the COVID outbreak. It is interesting that whenever there is a hardship that people experience in common with one another, teamwork suddenly seems to take over. Materially, however, I was brought up in a time when very few people had TV, and even then there was only one channel and that was in 'natural colour' (black and white)! Supermarkets were a thing of the future, and air travel was for the rich. Only 30 years later, by the mid-1980s, all that had changed, and people were even complaining that five TV channels were n