Whenever life gets you down, Mrs.Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enough
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving...
So commences the song that Eric Idle sang so well in " The Meaning of Life. " and when I listened to it recently, it got me thinking. Always a dangerous thing.
I pondered this for quite a while and it led me to my " I remember... " story for this week.
I was at Redhead's home the other day and I saw an oil painting of the beach that she lives near. It is a painting of a dog sitting beside an old timber seat. There are windsurfers and dog walkers and the beach is awash with surf that is rolling in. It has been there for years. Redhead's little Jack Russell posing on the dunes is at the forefront.
He was a young pup at the time and now sadly no longer with us.
But the beach is still there.
The dunes have come and gone so many times since the painting was created. The old wooden seat washed away years ago when a storm surge took it and the dunes. The windsurfers and dog walkers have been to work, married, had children and some of those in the painting have died. Time has marched on yet here, in this painting, there is a moment frozen in time.
The same but different.
Over the years, decades and centuries, a beach becomes covered in the tread marks of people who marched, skipped, lay, embraced, died and fought upon its surface.
We now have an incoming tide of people and ideologies who wish to wipe the beach clean and remove our imprints on its metaphorical memory. In that way, the beach will seem to be a blank canvas on which to paint a new past and, in doing so, create a new future. But underneath that new painting, there will still be the defiant image of the seat, the windsurfers and the little Jack Russell.
You can change a place name, ban a book or lock up a dissenter, but the grains of sand still wear the tread and the beat of the drum that is the heart of those who used to be.
Socialists around the world are so busy trying to eradicate history, its teaching and its authenticity.
People think that they can manipulate truth but it is impossible. As so many cultures from around the world have proven, oral history lasts longer than any written word. Memories are long and no matter how many books are burned, records altered or people removed from commentary, that thing called truth will somehow keep springing back like a seedling in a barren landscape.
History is invincible. No matter what armies try to kill it, destroy it, bury it or suppress it. Because history is truth. All else is propaganda.
In every house in every land around the world, there is a photograph, a painting, a person who has a memory.
This is what the likes of our political leaders should fear. The painting. The photograph. The memory.
Even as they try to take away our memories and our traditions and our values all they are doing is making our memories sharper. For every time that they sweep our beach clean, we walk back and make new footprints and new memories. They may steal our right to speak, to write and to express our opinions but they can never steal our memories.
We have become that Jack Russell sitting in the dunes in a painting … we may be older; we may be the grandchildren who played with him when he was a young pup; but we all hold our memories dear.
All Politicians around the world TODAY, remember one very important fact.
We will not be painted out.
No matter how hard they try; no matter how many " Disinformation Officers " or " Fact Checkers " they hire, they cannot take our memories.
When someone has dementia they lose that one vital part of life: that ability to remember. But in many cases they remember the past. Perhaps it is not such a lonely place after all.
How many of us have sat around a dinner table at an important family get together and told that story of " I remember when .. " and everyone at the table laughs and smiles and eyes glaze over as we head down memory lane and remember when...
Not all memories are good. Some are quite tragic. Yet somehow, the ability to remember the bad times enhances the good times.
How many soldiers came back from Normandy or the Somme and healed their wounded souls with the creation of new memories? A baby born, a marriage vow taken or a loving embrace from a loyal girlfriend who had kept the home fires burning?
Politicians and people like Klaus the Louse can burn books, take away our free speech and make life a living hell.
The tides will turn and the current dunes will be washed away, but the cycle of life will continue, long after we have ceased to tread the sands of this place we call home.
I will leave it to the Monty Python Team to take it from here and remind you of the closing lyrics:
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth
