“When summer suns are glowing, the world seems bright and gay,” as the old hymn goes and how we love those blue skies. We even take cruises or fly half way around the world in order to follow the sun. We lay out in our gardens and on the beaches in order to soak up as much of its rays as we can. “It’s healthy,” we say. I hope you will forgive an old man for indulging in a bout of nostalgia.
It is fascinating for me to reflect upon the changes in attitude that have been brought about by growing prosperity and greater literacy. When I was a boy living on a farm in the heart of Wales, summer was nice and for us children it was a time for running around out of sight of the adults, who were too busy to bother about us anyway. Nobody, or at least very few were attracted to sunbathing. The winter, with its cold and lack of sun, was seen by all as a blessed relief from the hard work that was a constant daily feature of life on the farm. Like in nature, winter was a time of comparative rest; a time for attending to those repairs and odd jobs that had to be overlooked during summer months; a time when life focussed more around the farm buildings than the fields; a time when work, apart from the milking, ended early as daylight faded and in the cosy warmth of the fire and the oil lamps, whist and draughts and chess could be played, socks could be knitted and needlework enjoyed. It was a time of the year when adults paid more attention to younger members of the family.
These days, more often than not, winter is a time, due to the advent of electric lighting and central heating, when little changes, except that the level of dissatisfaction seems to rise and people complain about the cold and the lack of sunshine. The medical profession has even invented a medical condition called S.A.D. to account for some people being unduly depressed during the darker days of winter! From eagerly anticipating the shorter days and reduced workload of winter; from welcoming the shorter days as an opportunity to draw closer to the family by spending time playing and chatting, it is now looked upon by many as a miserable time that cannot end soon enough. It has almost become the "winter of our discontent”, that Shakespeare talks about in a different context in Richard 111.
I realise what I am saying refers only to countries that experience sharp contrasts between summer and winter but as that is most countries in the world, I offer no apology for doing so. I know it is idle to wish to turn the clock back and new inventions cannot be un-invented. The television or its derivatives are here to stay, as is the motor car; the ubiquitous computer will not suddenly disappear and except during power cuts, the gentle light of candles is a thing of the past. Nevertheless, I do regret the passing of those simpler days when we were more aware of the rhythm of nature; we had to make our own entertainment; when the art of conversation was alive and well and we all welcomed the contrast between winter and summer as an opportunity to bring a measure of variety into our lives and prepare for the coming spring. It was genuinely a time of rest and replenishment which we now deny ourselves in our headlong rush to do, do, do!
For my family, being Spiritualists, the winter was a time for increasing activity on the psychic front. During the summer months there was usually a hiatus in the holding of the home circle, because people were on holiday or it was too warm to sit in comfort – there was no air conditioning! In autumn and winter the activity picked up. We would gather around the living room fire and invite the spirit world to draw close to us. In that wonderful hour or two we would feel so uplifted, would hear such wonderful words spoken and see such marvellous things, that winter outside the home was completely forgotten and we became part of a much larger family for a short while.
There was snow of course and just as today, we children couldn’t wait to go outside and play in it; to have snowball fights, pull each other on sledges, make long slides where it was icy enough and build snowmen. It was a time of magic and somehow adults seemed less concerned then about the inconvenience snow caused to their movements. It may be my imagination but I don’t think so. It was perhaps because adults tended to live closer to their places of work then and if the snow was bad, they could walk there instead of cycling or catching the bus. I remember it as a relatively peaceful time of the year and one when hobbies became the vogue. To me in those days a hobby only meant some indoor pursuit, like stamp collecting, painting, playing table football or reading for pleasure. Outdoor pursuits were not hobbies; gardening for instance was considered a necessity.
I know that time lends a warm glow to the past and we tend not to remember the hard times but I often wonder whether all we have achieved in terms of personal comfort and rising living standards has been bought at too high a cost. Are the higher levels of dissatisfaction and stress, that we have today a mere accident? Is the growth in our acquisitive tendencies a natural consequence of higher levels of civilisation? Is the high number of failed relationships inevitable? Does travel really broaden the mind and are we more empathetic towards our fellow human beings now we fly and sail so much more? With “instant this and instant that” it seems time itself has been telescoped and because we now look at life through the wrong end of this telescope, it seems to many that it stretches ahead of us interminably, especially when we are younger. I know that my childhood was the happier for the slower pace of life.
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