This morning I listened to a podcast where a man claimed that he still understood the country of his birth whilst living in another country. When challenged about this he had a one word explanation: Aircraft.
Now I have no idea how realistic it is to claim such an understanding. What I know is this: if you don’t engage with a place daily, you slowly stop understanding it. Things change. Changes, that had you still been living there, you might not have noticed. Coming back from time to time you would definitely notice them in a way you wouldn’t have in the past. It is at moments like this you start to realise that you are no longer of that place. The place may have deep roots buried in your soul. But you no longer live there. You have moved on.
I have noticed something during my travels through the lands of North West Leicestershire. It is a land of vistas. The carboniferous and Triassic bedrock has been shaped by countless metres of thick ice slowly flowing through the ice ages of the last 12 million or so years. This same ice has worn the once majestic pre Cambrian mountains into more lyric hills. Yet Bardon Hill still dominates.
Today this unremarked part of England is really no more than a dormitory for the larger conurbations to the north and south. Gone is the deep familiar accent with its middle English pronunciations. The great vowel shift is something that happened elsewhere. It is now replaced, certainly in the south, by the unmistakable accent of the West Midlands. Change happens.
In not too many years there will be no one left to remember. Such is the fate of the past.
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