ON LIFE, BLOGGING & DEATH.The 100th Blog of Said By Ned

Once again I have procrastinated somewhat over the content of my one hundredth blog. I wanted to make sure it was something special.

So it was good timing that my sister sent to me some DVD’s, which are copies of Super 8 films taken by a long lost uncle in the 1950’s. He was a wealthy farmer and had not only Super 8 movies but also colour film in his camera. He was decades ahead of the rest of us. 

So, we sat watching these dvd’s one night recently, mesmerised by my sister’s perpetual dancing with hoola hoops, with years between acts, still dancing and swirling the errant hoops around her arms in various locations until they invariably skittled off into the distance with her in pursuit and the camera left rolling, aimed at a fence or a wall or yet another garden full of flowers. Although sometimes, the flowers are black and white.

And there are my brothers. The eldest at four or five sporting the same frown he still characteristically wears 57 years later, looking ominously serious.  And the next one wearing his shorts and bib style outfit, straight from The Sound of Music.  His legs look brittle-ish and still are to this day.

The flickering images scoot about country South Australia capturing people and houses and cars and rodeos and towns that have long changed.  My grand mother and some of her 10 siblings are well represented in jittery poses, lined up out the front of houses, which looked old 60 years ago.

Cousins, aunts, uncles, neighbours and all sorts of unknown potential movie stars, grinning, dancing, waving, smelling flowers, all for the camera.

Lengthy footage of a harvester in full swing in the middle of a sea of swaying wheat fields with vision which still makes me nervous, for there on the knee of the driver is a young boy about 2 or 3 years old, perched restlessly and perilously close to the moving machinery at the feet of the operator.

I have written before about the many times I have joked with my family about the lack of photographs of myself from that era. Or in fact any era up to and including my late teens! I remember my father and my sister nearly crying with laughter when I have described myself sitting alone and melancholic browsing through my Baby Photo…all one of them…or it.  It seems cameras or film were in short supply once I was born, the last of four. Or maybe the novelty had just worn off, as novelties do.

But the films look beautiful to me because my mother is so eloquently shown looking after her children, in her prime years. She truly looks radiant. My father on the other hand, also has a repetitive party trick, not like the hoola hoops of my sister, but by being able to remove one of his front teeth with his tongue, pull a full on funny face to exaggerate the gap, and then replacing it with his tongue, in one smooth movement.  This is a trick we witnessed many many times in our childhood and it is the same trick he is capable of now in his final years.

Watching these films has stirred many memories and at the same time confirms the inevitable theory of how life is a cycle which just keeps turning. Because as I watch, I see uncles who left various bits and pieces of themselves over the battlefields of the World War 2, in a kind of macabre pre-cremation ceremony. But to the best of my knowledge they all returned and in most cases passed away in more or less chronological order, having been born apparently with strong genes in their blood and an angel looking over their shoulder.

My mother’s sad demise at 48 years of age was out-weighed in chronology terms by her own mother living to 102 years of age.  My father, currently 88 and hanging in there, was the youngest of ten, of whom all but one made it into their 80’s as did their parents, and the longest surviving made it to 99 years of age.

The thought strikes though, that out of everyone in those movies, (including that I did finally see about 4 seconds of myself as a baby in arms) nearly everyone is gone except my siblings and I although my father clings preciously to Life when his aim really seems to be, to be reunited with my mother, the love of his life.

My Baby Photo. Well, we think it's me. It could be any one of the neighbours in the street!! 

My siblings and I have all been blessed with children and then grand children popping out to carry on the dubious task of continuing the family line in a world full of uncertainty and peril. Any parent knows the feeling of wondering how this world will affect our children and grand children and beyond.

I wonder about 50 years from now, 100 years and 1,000 years. I wonder if the world will deteriorate even more, the current events escalating out of control and progressively eroding the planet morally and physically.

I wonder about whether my grandchildren will be safe, and their grandchildren. And I wonder about the kinds of lives they will lead. And I wonder but can’t imagine the world of international politics and how it will be played out.

I have spent some time reviewing my prior 99 blogs and am pretty relaxed with the diversity of comment. I have exposed my belief in the Afterlife, in things Paranormal; Ghosts and the Para-normal. By a one-time sceptic. which has had a huge number of hits, as well as The After-life: More Para-normal: What does it all mean?  I have discussed socks, jocks and religion and some pretty weird dreams Is this a message delivered by some kind of Para-normal ? I have written songs, poems, satire and comedy, which over four years is probably a fair indication of the psychology going on in my mind. I have even written about Bob the Builder ! (Bob The Builder, Wanging Ducks on the Head and...."So, You Want to Build a Duckery!") But it is also a way of recording certain events in my history to date, in a way that I hope will last pretty much forever.

Nothing is surer than the fact that the Wheel of Life keeps turning, that we all have an amazing story to tell and I am a believer in recording it for history. I hope I have hundreds of Blogs left in me yet, but who ever knows.

All I do know is that one day that Wheel will catch up with me too, like everyone else in those flickering images.

And I suppose that in a way, these written thoughts of mine will in themselves be my legacy of flickering images, catching glimpses and jumping about the scenes of my life along the way.

And I do hope that in a hundred years from now my descendants look at some of these writings and also say  What a funny life they had back then , back in the day of desk top computers and Blogs and something called a jock-strap.

Ned Hoskin

July 31, 2014.

www.wedbyned.com.au