The Calm after the Storm

Since the idea of a blog is that it should be a sort of diary, I think I should make something of a commitment to post a bit more regularly than I have been doing!  So here goes.  Yesterday was a 'calm after the storm' sort of a day - blue sky and sunshine after the strong wind and heavy rain of the day before . . . though I still did get rained on while out and about, and there is snow on the hills. More bad weather to come, they promise, so the calm before the storm as well. What a wet winter it has been! How long will it be before the farmers can do anything at all in most of the sodden fields around us?

The newspaper Ann brought home majored, like all our news bulletins just now, on the weather and its impact on our lives, with the flooding in the Thames Valley (home, I imagine, to many a senior journalist) very much at the centre of things. It also had on its front page, however, a school photo of the woman recently convicted of three murders and two attempted murders, compared to the adult photo of her brandishing a knife, which half the world has now seen. The trial of the men who assisted her in her crimes has come to its conclusion. The contrast between the innocent face and quiet smile of the girl in the school photo and the reality of the events recounted in court couldn't be greater, but what actually leads a person to become what she became is hard to assess - what combination of nature and nurture, the genes we inherit and what the world does to us. Why is it that the same sort of  experience hardens one person, and breaks another, brings one person to faith and drains the faith away from another? What in particular breaks the restraining code of morality that for most of us, religious or not, governs our behaviour and guides the decisions we make?

I found an old school photograph of my class, on which I look quite angelic. I was surprised not to be able to put names to most of the other children. I remember many of the names, of course, but matching them to the faces is beyond me. As far as I know, none of them has become an axe-murderer, though I'm pretty sure at least one has spent time inside, at Her Majesty's pleasure, as they say. I certainly couldn't tell which by looking at the picture, though!

An axe murderer features in the Van Veeteren story (crime novels by Hakan Nesser) that I've just started. A quote from the first few pages of that book, which I thought worthy of reflection: ". . . did there come a point, (Van Veeteren) had started to wonder, beyond which we no longer look forward to something coming, but only to getting away from what has passed?" Discuss, as they say. I suppose I do hope that by the end of my life I may feel I am ready to leave it - but I do also hope that until that time I shall continue to look forward in hope and expectation. I may also look back, and at times that will be with regret, but I should not ever wish that to be the dominant theme of my existence. Or at least, not until the last possible moment.