I Didn't Write Anything Until

The Past Is Our Ultimate Privacy; We Pile It Up, Year By Year, Decade By Decade, It Stows Itself Away, With Its Perverse Random Recall System.

I'm Not An Historian And I'm Not Wanting To Write About How I Perceive The Social Change Over The Century As A Historian, But As Somebody Who's Walked Through It And Whose Life Has Been Dictated By It Too, As All Our Lives Are.

I Have Long Been Interested In Landscape History, And When Younger And More Robust I Used To Do Much Tramping Of The English Landscape In Search Of Ancient Field Systems, Drove Roads, Indications Of Prehistoric Settlement. Towns And Cities, Too, Which Always Retain The Ghost Of Their Earlier Incarnations Beneath Today's Concrete And Glass.

We All Act As Hinges-fortuitous Links Between Other People.

We Make Choices But Are Constantly Foiled By Happenstance.