History

I've commented before that I often find it harder to recall the memory tags for recent days than for days long gone.

This has been particularly true this week, for two conflicting reasons. On the one hand, the days are similar in routine and location. On the other hand, there have been some significant developments in resolving some personal issues through discussions with my wife.

Information has filled my mind and it has made it difficult to separate out what happened on one day rather than another.

Only as the week has reached its end have I been able to construct the images to capture each day, attaching the progress towards a resolution of the issues my wife and I have been discussing to the subtly different landmarks of time and place.

I am reminded that life is lived going forwards, but understood looking backwards.

What we choose to remember is, to some extent, dependent on the story we tell of our own lives. This is undoubtedly even more true in following this process of remembering, where I construct an image for each day to capture the essential facts I want to keep forever: I consciously choose those facts.

Newspapers have been described as "The first draft of history".

I didn't quite understand this when first I heard it. It seemed to me that news written at the time would be superior to someone from the future looking back on events with only partial details to piece together a story. But I came to understand that history needs to be pieced together and interpreted. The news stories for a particular day may only provide glimpses of a greater picture that comes to view with a little distance.

So it is has been this week. Each day a piece of the puzzle emerged to slot together by the week's end.