Summer has been coming and going – well – all summer. It’s been one of those seasons that seems to enjoy the game of hide-and-seek here on the south coast of England. When I’ve had enough time to go for a swim or sit on the beach blasts of wind have come out of nowhere or rain clouds have sailed into the sky at the rate of knots! Now it’s officially autumn and the weather game continues to wax and wane; the air temperature like a yo-yo. Today I am warm, and glad of the summer clothes I still couldn’t quite bear to put away. Of course, climate change aficionados will say it’s all part of global warming, that catch-all phrase that has now embedded itself in the English language. Whether that is genuinely so or not – there is debate on this when you look outside of the mainstream box – I somewhat selfishly want a bit of warmth that didn’t quite make the headlines in the so-called summer months. Indian summer it used to be called, and I recall many of those back in earlier decades before we became the purveyors of doom and gloom.
I can see now that, as I was born only a few years after WW2, my parents and their generation were hell-bent on rebuilding and regrowth, of bringing some sanity and order to society. As a child you don’t have history trailing behind you, affecting the way things are or should be. You just live and accept life as it unfolds, until you grow up and start looking back at what may have seemed like the good old days. But were they? Are they ever just good or bad? And what from level of that do we judge? There is what’s going in the world outside and then there’s what’s going on inside one’s personal experience of the world. More and more in this current time, I find myself mentally checking whether I should say what I’m thinking. Children say whatever they see. I recall once seeing a woman with a fox-fur draped round her when I was maybe 5 or 6. I asked my mother – probably in a loud voice -is that lady’s dog (that’s what I saw) dead? And she told me off and said it was rude to say things like that. I couldn’t understand why anybody would wear a dead animal, or why it was rude to say it. These early admonitions or “lessons” stick in your head for the wrong reasons. That’s when self-policing begins in a way that breeds separation and learnt behaviour, which so often blocks natural and meaningful communication.
Luckily we have the ability to break free of the mainstream view that we’ve been subjected to in varying degrees via schooling and media, that is a kind of brain-bashing into a collective acceptance of what is considered to be normal. As children we are in awe of the natural world that seems at odds with the rules and regulations at home and then later at school. Our natural intelligence can so often be hijacked and at times annihilated by prescriptive education. If, like me, you were more on the creative side, there was little in my education of help if you struggled with maths or science or other subjects that you didn’t have a natural feel for. In my school I was was made to feel stupid for not understanding the more cerebral subjects. But despite my techno-blindness (as I call it!) I have had a successful career in the Arts. It’s good to celebrate and acknowledge our differences. There is a place for all of it. We are not robots, though it would seem that the powers-that-be would like us to be! But the kick-back is invoking an ever-growing band of free-thinkers who will not roll over and die on the hill of prescriptive group-think.