Saturday, 28 November 2015

A year to the day brings about another end

It is  exactly a year to the day that I started this blog and this will be my last post. It is time to move on. Our first year living in Beeston has been eventual and life changing in unexpected ways, which we have come to terms with, but it has changed our priorities.

Beeston is a great place to live and we instantly felt at home. Susan first lived in the town whilst a student at Nottingham University in the late-sixties and we have been weekly visitors since 1996. I resolved a couple of years ago to give up being on any committees or too closely involved with any group. At seventy-one and after fifty-five years of being a community and Labour Party activist, I feel no need to apologise for deciding to take a back seat.

The truth is I have a memoir of sorts I want to give more time to. I have been thinking about it since a family conversation over Christmas 2010, which led me to join the WEA Beeston Writing Class at the beginning of 2011 and this, in turn, led me to discovering the pleasure which comes from writing fiction - very different to my published writing since the 1970s, all of which has been about local history, politics and localism.

It was my lifelong commitment to localism (and the idea of taking a photograph every day for a year of life in Lenton Recreation Ground) which prompted my first blog, parkviews.blogspot.co.uk, which I began at the beginning of 2007, encouraged by my friend Rosie, who started blogging in 2005 (and has a very successful blog called 'Corners of my mind'). I 'retired' parkviews when I started this blog. Parkviews was about Lenton, where we lived for thirty-five years until we moved to Beeston.

This blog will stay in situ, along with parkviews and a couple of other little blogs I started for some reason or another, including one about growing up in Wembley.

I also have other passions I want to enjoy more (maps and gardening for example), so something has to go. Life is time limited and I want to have as few commitments as possible and, as much as I have enjoyed doing Beestonweek, the blog is a commitment.

To my few regular visitors, I say thank you for reading me. I may share some of my fiction, even my memoir. Right now, I wish you a lovely Christmas break and a 2016 you would wish for yourself.

Robert Howard





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