MORNING SERIAL
AND there again, any matter-offact rigmarole which escaped, or was excused, any casual entrapment of the moment by a contemporary scribe, albeit floating free in its shapeless happenstance in the historical ether of recollection, can only possess the properties of being as a dream of what once might have passed for reality.
I baulk at this even as I perforce acknowledge it, for I am no dreamer and, resolutely, long ago decided against such seduction.
Yet I was no doer of deeds either. I am, or was the by-stander, the observer, the note-keeper, the diarist, the hoarder, the archivist, the reader, the remembrancer.
Never the historian. I was only secretarial to that time, in those years now gone, for those people since disappeared from it all, as I will soon be myself.
I spent my own lifetime paring back, both professionally and so far as I personally was concerned.
Cutting back whatever threatened to grow too vigorously, pruning whatever might be overly-luxuriant if allowed to flourish, hedging in any excess.
I made it my business to make judicious choices. I sought elegant solutions for all that thrashing about and rambling in word and deed.
Sometimes, I now note, from my reading of others, that what I manufactured as verity and left to become forensically verifiable, has become History itself, or apparently so.
What I did, in memoranda and notes of advice and in official reports and, yes, by redacted minute-taking, was to remove any shadows which were cast too far and too long, their doubt darkening certainties, or else I blocked out any light which focussed too intensely on aspects better left unseen lest they dazzle and mis-lead.
I had, when young, stumbled, purblind, down that overly illuminated path. I shunned that way in my maturity.
I set myself, too, against the deceiving pulse of memory, though it could, at times, beat its way back, involuntary but unstoppable.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW