Preliator

I was watching Time Team this evening (unusual for a Saturday), and they were uncovering a Norman castle which had been attacked when Stephen and Matilda were battling over the throne of England. I remembered I’d actually learnt a bit about that battle in my first year at university, and it brought home to me the fact that I’m actually starting to forget some of the things I learnt there. Memory loss is something one normally associates with old age, but I don’t think it’s quite that which I’m experiencing here. I recall learning about things when I hear about them again, when the memory is triggered by something I see or hear, or even touch or smell.

If I think about a smell triggering a memory, what springs quite vividly to mind is a trip to Yorvik I went on eleven years ago. There was a part of the museum, I think, where you got into a cart, and “went back in time” as they put it. The cart took you past all these displays of how people lived back when the Vikings were invading York (or didn’t live in some cases), and the overriding thing I remember about the ride was the smell. I think, I can’t be absolutely sure, but I think the smell was burning peat. Of course the Vikings were famous for their burn-rape-pillage approach to visiting other countries, but the burning of peat (if that is indeed what I remember) would have denoted proper settlement. Some Vikings did settle, as did Romans, Normans and Saxons.

I apologise if this is reading a bit like a History lesson, I didn’t really mean it to be. My aim was more to see how my memory reacted when I drew from the metaphorical well that I consider to be my knowledge of History. Sadly, the well isn’t as deep, nor as full, as I would like it to be. When I hear about these events that shaped the world as we know it today, I want to know more about them, to understand why things happened the way they did. Some of the things left behind by our ancestors I find both astonishing and fascinating, and I can’t help but wonder – what will our legacy be? I wonder this, but I’m not sure I really want to know the answer.

I saw a film recently called Origin: Spirits of the Past, wherein what we know today (cities, skyscrapers, a sea of technology) has been swallowed up by nature. It’s a sort of post-apocalyptic world in which humans are forced to co-exist with nature in harmony. They can’t actually get something as simple as water without asking nicely for it. The film is incredibly similar to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, but in Origin we see more of what used to exist “pre-apocalypse” as it were. Oddly enough, the world doesn’t look too shabby, and some people even see it as a playground that they can go exploring in, finding hidey holes and uncovering new things. It seemed strangely idyllic, and I found myself thinking when I was watching it that it wouldn’t actually be a bad place to live (ignoring the huge city outside the forest which belched out smoke and fumes and looked like a giant steam-punk mess that had just been thrown down at random in the vain hope that somehow it would just work).