As life moves on, moves me on to my 70th year, I have time to ponder, reflect and consider. I have the mind for it too, because it seems to me that now I am looking in a different direction, one I have never known before. When young and full of family life, its accompanying chaotic joys and disasters, my eyeballs swivelled every which way, conscious of what was about to happen, what had just happened and what the hell I could do to stop it happening again. Nowadays the happening thing is mostly my own choice. Setting aside responsive reaction, say to a burst pipe or a postal delivery, I am the Happener, inhabiting endless space and time, able and sometimes unwilling, to ponder, reflect and consider. My thoughts wander over old mountains, some conquered, some the conquerors, over wild moor and vast expanses of desert sand. Some pondering lead me to old crimes, my old crimes and I squinge with discomfort as the memory builds into a certain prison sentence. I retreat quickly because I know well how false a memory can be, constructed over time, bridges built to connect two sets of circumstance that never came together at the time. It chuckles me as I banish the imaginary ghoul of mismemory. Away with you! I say. You were never thus.

This morning my thoughts, floating like tumbleweeds over tundra, billowed by a backwind, turn to what we leave behind and the list is long. Physical and metaphysical knowledge, recipes, familial data, skin flakes, nursery rhymes, stories of this and that, music, poetry, habits, opinions, demands, mistakes, gifts, DNA, clothing preferences, reactions, attitudes, diaries, kindnesses and so much more, our legacy. Such an unattractive word I think for such a potentially wonderful thing. So what do I want to leave behind when I am no longer here? A cloud of gas or a flight of light and beauty, peppered with humour and fairies? I know my answer to that and if I want to achieve such levity I must needs make certain of it because it is my choice and nobody else’s. How I choose to enter this part of my wonderfully ridiculously rambunctious life is a daily consideration. Not for me a decline into the grumps, nor the moans, nor the fatalism I had witnessed in my own now dead forbears who, bless their loving hearts, probably didn’t think they had any choice at all. My full of nonsense mother once said, and firmly, to me “There was no such thing as positive thinking in my day.” And she really believed that. However, these days we know different, that attitude is everything, regardless of circumstance, blight, long winters, loneliness, loss and no sourdough bread left in the village shop. We may not be able to ice skate upright, open jars of jam or lift a sack of potatoes but we can always laugh at ourselves, accepting that it is not our time for such shows of prowetic strength and besides we can always ask for help. Perhaps this time of quietening down is fulsome and maybe necessary for our young. In this age of Granny or Grandad, we can observe, soothe, stravaigle, consider and encourage, even if we barely understand what it must be like for young folk in this fast-paced, sometimes dangerous technological time. But we can teach observation, ask gentle questions, read together, wander over ancient ground, speak of the land, the sky, the sea, the winds with stories on their backs. We can show the mysteries of life, teach rhymes and songs, gift our time, time and more time because we have time now and they do not, not yet, not whilst life is a dash and a hurry, a fight, a competition, a langtangle of skids and slips, of leaps and crashes, of information invasion.

It was the same for us, many many years ago, and we remember the turmoil of growing up. Now we are growing down and I knew it yesterday as my eldest son walked into the church to watch the children’s nativity play. I used to be a foot taller, I thought, as he loomed over me grinning. I am shrinking. Good. That is fine with me and it means I can hide under a table with the children, with the giggles and the shushes and the chance to tie the adults shoe laces together.