Journal | Truly Global
Journal
Volume 1
I
REVIEWING the website’s analytics, I needed to look up the populations of the two most recent countries (in December 2020) to have joined the circulation - Kazakhstan and Sweden - and thus bringing the outreach, at that time, to forty-nine countries. It now sits at eighty-eight countries. The four nations of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England are recorded as one nation ~ the United Kingdom. However, the analytics provide me with a breakdown of our four island nations, as each nation is separate and distinct and with its own character and personality, not to mention the difference in geography which tends to take first time visitors unawares.
II
Yesterday, I was involved in family archive research for one of my cousins, within the time frame 1880 - 1920.
There were some amazing discoveries, handwritten postcards of ancestors five generations back, bringing their faint images and postcard scenes fully into focus; a trip to the local town eight miles away being something of a major expedition; and leaving my legal mind pondering on just how a daughter managed to sell or dispose of the roof over mother’s head without her consent!
One of the oddities of my family’s history.
III
The more I delved, the more it became clear. Ah! The cottage was not held by mother and father in fee simple absolute; rather it was tied!
The mists of time cleared, although it does not remove the distress that a daughter’s over-hasty approach to both her mother, her elder sister with whom mother was convalescing following the loss of her husband, their father, and to the wider family.
IV
Nothing changes. We see things we do not like today. Rest assured, human behaviour and misbehaviour was as ruthless then as it is now. When a very dear friend in Germany read this line today, I was most grateful to her for reminding me of something else, too.
““No one was, or is, in your life without a reason: one was, or is, a gift, the other a lesson”. ”
This is so, so true!
Back to the analytics. I decided to look at the Worldometer. I sat on its homepage, mesmerised. Take a look. See the globe in real time.
Occasionally, an experience is a ‘first’. Well, that home page definitely falls into that category. It widens my perspective and, as a lay person, renders me the tiniest dot on the scape of our Universe.
In a fascinating work Michaelangelo : God’s Architect by William E. Wallace, the author sums up our need to always obtain perspective on history when he quotes the Historian John Elliott on page 6 of the Introduction to his Work:
“‘The writing of good history is “the ability to enter imaginatively into the life of a society remote in time and place, and produce a plausible explanation of why its inhabitants thought and behaved as they did.” ‘”
V
We bemoan the Internet, and I quickly tire of those who tell me that our search for a vaccine may conceal the insertion of a microchip at the needle point.
Get real. Read reality, stop reading conspiracy theory.
Do yourself a favour, and all those around you who have to put up with listening to such rubbish.
10 June 2022
All Rights Reserved
© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2022
First written 16 December 2020
Ken Webb is a writer and proofreader. His website, kennwebb.com, showcases his work as a writer, blogger and podcaster, resting on his successive careers as a police officer, progressing to a junior lawyer in succession and trusts as a Fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives, a retired officer with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and latterly, for three years, the owner and editor of two lifestyle magazines in Liverpool.
He also just handed over a successful two year chairmanship in Gloucestershire with Cheltenham Regency Probus.
Pandemic aside, he spends his time equally between his city, Liverpool, and the county of his birth, Gloucestershire.
In this fast-paced present age, proof-reading is essential. And this skill also occasionally leads to copy-editing writers’ manuscripts for submission to publishers and also student and post graduate dissertations.
