Past Times

So we have another election looming. The feeling of security goes out of the window and in comes that uneasy feeling in the pit of the stomach that things may get worse.* I mutter to myself every day, “Oh, please don’t let MH get to be PM.” I cringe every time I see him on television because he brings back memories of those awful, fearful Thatcher years and will be forever associated with her in my memory. I could just about tolerate a Conservative victory, if I really had to, but, please God, not with him at the helm. I know I will support Labour, I always do, even though I was very upset with TB when he took us into the war against the wishes of the UN and the rest of Europe and a lot of us Brits too. At that time I was really ashamed of and aghast at what we had done, but I can’t, in all honesty vote for any other party. I will vote for the party and all it has stood for in the past; not for its present leader because he probably won't be PM for the whole five years if they get in. It would be against my very being to step away from my beliefs, no matter how archaic others may think they are, it would seem like letting down my ancestors who for generations until the last two, have worked down the mines. My great grandfather was killed in an awful pit cage accident, my grandfather died from pneumoconiosis or “miners lung”. Generations before them struggled for survival in poor conditions and for low wages. My 5 x great grandfather was a prospector who traveled, in the 1780s, from the Welsh Borders and the Forest of Dean into Derbyshire with a gang of men and they would open up coal seams and try to get local business men interested. No doubt they would all have been issued with settlement orders naming the parish of their birth. What a precarious life. On the other side my great - great grandfather was a tailor who came down into England from Fife, Scotland, again I assume looking for work and again, I would imagine settlement orders were an issue.

* I don’t want to go back to those days of worry, when either one or the other of us was unemployed because of redundancy,** when we had to move from the area we had grown up in, getting further away from our families. Luckily, unlike my ancestors, we didn’t need settlement orders in case we became a burden on the parish we moved to.
** by sheer luck we were never unemployed at the same time so we always worked on the principle of one wage for two when taking up rental agreements or seeking mortgages – just in case it should ever happen again.