Not Your Usual Monday Morning Assembly

In April 1981 the typically dreary tone of Monday morning assembly at Eastwood High School was cranked up a few thousand notches by the fact that we had a guest speaker.

And this was no ordinary guest speaker.

James Irwin was the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 15 and the eighth person to walk on the moon barely nine years earlier. He happened to come to our school in a quiet suburb of Glasgow, Scotland, to talk about his experiences in NASA, the Apollo 15 mission and what it was like to have set foot on another heavenly body. He brought along a piece of moon rock which he briefly held aloft from the front of the stage.

In common with a number of other NASA astronauts, Irwin had returned to earth in 1972 with an augmented religious faith. Some have likened the experience of travelling so far away from Earth that you can block out its very existence from view with just the thumb of your hand, as metaphorically god-like. Whatever had happened to Irwin as he looked back to Earth from the lunar surface, this same force had brought him to our Monday assembly to talk about the moon and god.

I recall that the somewhat incongruous associations Irwin made between science and faith were both interesting and uninteresting; my twelve-year-old self wished at the time that Irwin had just stuck to speaking about the moon.

But looking back now as an adult, I realise that it was an amazing privilege to hear and see him at all, and it gave my already growing interest in science and technology a real push. Religion, not so much.

Glasgow

I had a dream the other night - one of those random, staccato edited MTV style dreams with no real purpose or plot continuity - in which there was a scene where I travelled back to Glasgow by train and was met by some friends, but as I walked down the platform at the station I found the entire experience of going home very emotionally overwhelming and I cried.

I think I need to get home soon. It's been eight months, the longest stretch away thus far since we moved here in 2001.

Terminate and Stay Resident

I fear I may have become spiritually homeless. Living in a spiritual cardboard box, as it were.

Since our economic migration away from Glasgow three and a half years ago, we've been trekking back 'home' about three or four times each year to visit friends and family, last week being the latest such trip. And it was during and since this last trip that I detected a marked shift in how my memories and recollections of my former home compare with current perceptions and realities.

Some of the first changes I noticed during early trips back home were architectural. New buildings would appear in and around the city, and some of the older ones would quietly dissapear in my absence. City centre traffic rules would change without warning and many other subtle and not so subtle modifications to the physical landscape would avail themselves of my notice.

But my lately I've noticed how much my old home's social landscape has also changed, albeit more slowly but just as profoundly.

It seems that three or so years is about enough time for people to die, to marry, move home, lose their jobs, get new jobs, have babies, fall seriously ill and slowly recover, get older, get divorced or change their interior decor. Or just fundamentally, they change. The change in this social architecture slowly deconstructs and eats away at my memory of 'home'. The Glasgow I left in the summer of 2001 is not the same Glasgow I visit today and with each year that passes, the magnitude of that change grows inexorably.

The physical stuff you notice quickly, the social change less so. So, my 'home' no longer exists as it does in my memory, rendering me quite sad and with a vague sense of spiritual homelessness.

For at the other end - Northamptonshire and our home since the summer of 2001 - the architectural changes are less noticeable - since I'm living within them every day - and the social side is slow to build leaving it immature and shallow with a micro network of friends in our immediate geography in comparison with what we left behind after 34 years. So, here isn't home either, the roots just aren't deep enough. Yet.

However, the one consistent social environment which spans this entire period of change is my web based social network. This world contains some of the contacts from my previous life and some new friendships and aecquaintances forged since. This 'always on' social network takes quite a different form from it's worldy significant other but can be just as compelling.

May 3rd, 2003
...is it because quitting your weblog is a form of virtual suicide, as you willfully bring about your own cessation of existence in our online world? Of course, you obviously invisibly existed in it prior to blogging whenever you visited a site, but it's the act of writing yourself into existence when you start blogging that results in the creation of a version of your self that is visible to others. When you pull the plug on your blog, does this equate to a form of suicide? Is that why we don't like to talk about it and choose to doggedly keep going even when we have nothing new or blogworthy to say, so you just keep on going as a means of existence rather than creativity or participation?

And so, I wonder if perhaps this web existence is my primary motivation or need to keep this weblog going.

Anyway, I think I'll stick around 'here' for some time.