Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Oct 7, 2004
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days, that all these memories come flooding back to me.
Time
It seems hard to believe, but I was checking back over some of the earlier Snippets and it just occurred to me that I have been writing them for over a year now!
It seems just like yesterday when Shazz contacted me to write one every week for The Post. What actually started them off, to begin with, was that they were journal entries which some people used to read and contact me about. In fact, Abbi was the first person to contact me on this site after I had been aced by Batty.
My first contact with this site was through a story written about the sinking of the Pacific Glory by a fellow researcher. have been coming in here every day since then. The reason I was reading that story was the fact that I was on board Hms Zulu, one of the rescue ships, at the time of the sinking, and the experience has remained with me ever since.
Come to think of it, I have never written a Snippet about that incident. Suffice to say it was a really scary experience, especially when we were in the sea which was on fire while we searched the water in a small Gemini boat for survivors. When you're a young eighteen-year-old sailor you don't think about the dangers as you feel invincible at that age. Another reason I remember that incident well was because we were short crewed at the time due to a lot of the crew being away for weekend leave. This meant that everyone on board had to work the whole seventy hours we were out there, leaving us all completely drained at the end of it all. The smell of the burning oil and the heat it produced stuck in my mind, as did the feeling of being hypnotised by watching the flames as they danced over the blackened sea.
Looking back over such incidents as that, can and do distort our perception of time in general. We tend to use family weddings and funerals as markers in time, like for example; it was around the time of your sisters wedding when that happened. We seem to be able to remember every little detail of something that happened, say, fifteen years ago, yet we can't remember an incident that happened last month. Sometimes even important events that really affected our lives at the time get forgotten, or certain details are the only ones we can remember.
Having lost contact with my own family after a divorce, I tend to use events from my new family as markers these days, like the birth of our Grandchildren for example. Come to think of it, in the past fourteen years that I have been together with my second wife, I have watched her family grow up and have children of their own. The fact that I have taken a part in their growing up makes me feel even closer to them and their children.
Yet sometimes I find myself wondering just what happened to all those years. What did I do? Where was I at that time? Looking through some old photographs of my own children growing up, I realised that I missed most of that, due to the fact that I was always working away from home. Time somehow seems to have slipped past me and now here I am, at the age of fifty three, trying to recall as many events as I can.
That was the reason I started to write these Snippets really, as they are all taken from past events of my life.
So I suppose, when I look back over it now, I have had a good life really, with plenty of adventure along with some really good and bad spells.
I am glad that I packed so much into the first forty nine years; they have given me plenty to reflect on while I struggle with this concept of time. Since my accident five years ago now, which put an end to working life, I have had plenty of time to just sit and think back. Some may say that this is a bad thing but, for me, it has given me a chance to gather all these memories and write about them in here.
I did lead a busy and full working life, so busy in fact that I ended up losing my family over it, but at least I never spent all my working life in one place with the same company. Yes, I do regret some things now, especially now that I have more time to think back over them.
It seems funny now but, when I was working, my watch was the first item I put on in the morning when I got up and the last item I took off at night. It controlled my life then, this small machine that we wear on our wrist; it controls us! We race around all our working lives, being controlled by this watch on our wrist, telling us where to be and when. Yet believe me when I tell you, that the day you take that watch off and put it away, your whole life, and indeed your attitude towards it, will change. It certainly is a funny thing, this thing we call time.
