Going West

There’s a gap in the posting dates between this and the last. That’s because we’ve gone west: moved from one side of the country to the other.

What that means to you probably depends on where you live. In the New World, going west was always a fulfilment of Manifest Destiny. Go West and Make Your Fortune. The West a direction of opportunity.

But there’s an elegiac air about the west in the Old World – probably because, as far as most people knew, it was the end of the world; the place where the sun went to set over the endless ocean. The Abendland – evening land. Coupled with this is a kind of folk memory of peoples pushed to the fringes of the continent by successive waves of invaders from the East, so that to go to the west is an image of decline, of a world and way of life ended.

I’m the same as most people who move house – looking on it as a chance for reinvention. A new life. Of course you can never escape yourself. But what you can do is draw from different wells. And some of them will rejuvenate.

We’ve a well in the garden of our “new” house, as it happens. Perhaps, like Merlin in “The Sword in the Stone”, I’ll be getting younger every year from now on…