January is not one of those months that creep up on you. Somehow you know it is coming long before it arrives, and for me its coming has always carried a slight sense of foreboding. Whether this is because it get dark early, or because January is close to the hope and delights felt at Christmas I do not know. However I suspect that it is because, as soon as I became aware of what ‘New Year’ meant, that was the same moment when I realised that it did not mean one year more but one less! All the more reason then for me to stick with the optimism most of us feel at Christmas and to carry that as a positive thought into the New Year.
If I want to be positive and hopeful however it is no use listening to the BBC news. This seems determined to inculcate a sense of doom and gloom into the minds of the British people. Although most frontline BBC staff have been educated at one of the Russell Group universities, few appear to have read history. If they had, they would surely know how innovative, flexible, adaptable and inventive the British people were and still are. Most of us are adventurous, open to ideas, reliable and innovative. The DNA left to us by our ancestors also means we are resilient, and it is that which has enabled us to stay hopeful and cheerful despite the apparent fears of the metropolitan media.
Talking about DNA however, a few months ago, Marie and I sent saliva off to Ancestry.com and discovered that our ancestors are Ancient Britons with additions from a very wide swathe of Western and Northern Europe. I also had traces of Portuguese, Marie’s was very similar but with more Irish, (Ancient British) than mine. I also had 0.037% from Indonesia and Persia. Within days of the results I had an email from a Nigel Wells of Lincolnshire, whose great grandfather was a brother of my great grandfather. This means we are both descended from Richard Wells (1634) of Lough in Lincolnshire. Then in mid-November I received another email, this time from a relative whose ancestor went to Australia in 1830. I have yet to reply but my guess is that he was sent there for some malediction against English law. As soon as I find out more, readers will be told the truth about the antipodean branch of our family. Maybe he was a sheep stealer who was shipped to Oz where he became a wealthy sheep farmer. On the other hand he might have become a confederate of Ned Kelly and hanged.
We have the Mormon Church to thank for much of the interest in modern genealogy. This is because Joseph Smith its founder, and later, Brigham Young, put into practice Baptism for the Dead. Had they not done so, it is fairly certain that the records of ordinary people would now be rotting away in damp corners of churches and old buildings across the whole of Europe. As it is, copies of all old church registers from about 1550 onwards are now on micro-fiche and computer records in huge caverns under the mountains near Salt Lake City.
Baptism for the dead was an ancient religious ceremony practiced by a number of local religions throughout the Middle East. Possibly also by some early Christians in Corinth and, although St Paul wrote a letter to the Corinthians saying he thought the practice illogical, it was picked up by Joseph Smith just before his death in 1840, and became a developed doctrine of the Mormon Church under Brigham Young.
But to return to the gloom perpetually churned out by the broadcast and written media. Despite their position being somewhat privileged they appear very gloomy. I wonder if it is because for them, life has become routine. With few exceptions their lives are free of risk to the extent that every physical and social ‘Need and Want’ has been fully met. With no crisis today, can it be that they get their kicks by inventing crises for the future? If so, this may explain their apparent desire to control the future. After all, the logic is the same as that used by similar people who, on finding nothing lacking in their lives today, then try to re-write history to make it say something that will give them feelings of deprivation about their lives today. Both groups are secure today and so then try to influence the future or the past. They do so by engaging in what psychologists call displacement activity. This activity then displaces the activity which would have been needed to deal or adapt to the realities of the present day.
I end however by reflecting on the dichotomy between media gloom and people’s hopes and from which we can construct some paradoxical, yet humorous outcomes. Take, for example the elderly lady who rang her GP. “Is it true,” she asked, “that the medication you prescribed has to be taken for the rest of my life?” “Yes” He replied, “I’m afraid so.” A long silence was broken only when the tearful lady burst out,
“Then how long have I got, because the bottle is labelled No Refills”?
View from the Pew 