Wishing all my readers a happy, healthy, peaceful and prosperous Christmas.  May this season and the coming new year fill you with joy, hope, and good cheer.  Merry Christmas!

Recently I have been copy-editing a German to English translation of a child-rearing book by a behavioural psychologist for a Swiss client.  It got me thinking about my many visits to Switzerland and Austria, my recent catch-up with an old friend from that part of the world, and my life-long love of the alpine region.

Part of this love and interest started at the age of eleven, when I read a children’s adventure story at my school library.  ‘The Sign of the Alpine Rose,’ was the fourth in the ‘Jillies’ books by prolific (yet sadly oft forgotten) English author, Malcolm Saville.

During his eighty-one years, Saville wrote around ninety books.  The majority were adventure stories for children with a strong sense of place, like the ‘Lone Pine’ series, but he also wrote about the English countryside and his strong Christian faith.  His memory and work are still celebrated by a society in his honour, which has annual meet-ups and a quarterly magazine: http://www.witchend.com

The strong sense of place I have described, echoes throughout ‘The Sign of the Alpine Rose.’  The book is set in the fictional mountain village of Bertch, in a post-war Austria divided into various occupation zones.  Written in 1950, the story is akin to a slightly more grown-up ‘Famous Five’ book, in which two daughters and a son travel with their widowed artist father to visit a foreign pen friend.
The father of the pen friend never returned from the war, and is being held captive in the communist occupied zone.  The book describes how the visiting Jillions family get involved with an underground movement of free Austrians, seeking to help their countrymen escape the communist controlled territory.  The symbol of this movement is the Alpenrose (Rhododendron ferrugineum), which is typically worn in the hat or buttonhole as a form of covert identification.

The narrative oozes with beautiful descriptions of the scenery, architecture and rustic lives and culture of the native Austrians.  As a young lad this had a powerful effect on me, and for many years after I searched bookshops to try and obtain my own copy.  Saville died less than a year before I read this wonderful story, and it was out of print long before it arrived in our school library.

In my late thirties, and with the advent of the Internet, I finally managed to track down a first edition from a second hand bookshop.  Reading it again was like being re-united with a long lost friend.

The other day, and prompted by my work on the Swiss book, I decided to read it once more.
There is a paragraph I would like to share with you, that speaks volumes about the human perception of change:

‘He had a passion for beauty, and only now was his elder daughter beginning to realize how much he sacrificed to give his children an education which would enable them to appreciate what was really worthwhile in a world which, he maintained, lacked the vitality, colour and vigour of the days before the cinema and television dominated so many leisure hours.’

Considering Saville wrote that in 1950, one can only imagine the horror with which both he and the character he describes would view the world of today!

The freedom with which the children are allowed to go off on unsupervised adventures (as long as they are home in time for tea), reminds me of my own childhood.  Playing in the great outdoors, enjoying nature, using our imaginations.  Sometimes the clever technology that is supposed to free us seems more like a shackle, and I feel sorry for the younger and future generations who appear to miss out on many healthy, simple yet important pleasures that were our daily experience.
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It was good to go back to Bertch…

​George Santayana is credited with first making an oft-quoted statement along the lines of: ‘Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’

In the UK at present, our news coverage is largely filled with daily claims and counter-claims on both sides of the EU Referendum argument for staying or leaving.  While I have my own personal views, I do not use this blog for political purposes.  I have however noticed one common theme not specifically related to the topic which I have observed elsewhere, that seems to have reared its head a lot in recent months.  I am talking about the dismissal of life experience and the wisdom it affords, by the younger generation.

Just this morning I switched channels past a breakfast TV programme, where the ‘Remain’ campaign were building a strategy to convince university students to vote in favour of staying in.  The representative was making the point that the future does not belong to their parents and grandparents, but to the young.  Ergo: they should supposedly not give two hoots about what the older generation (who largely wish to leave the EU) are considering to do on polling day.
While nobody is disputing the simple fact that the future does belong mostly to the young, it was the dismissive tone which brought to mind other similar experiences of late.

It seems to be a curiously western phenomenon that growing old is viewed as a negative thing.  People are desperate to reverse the appearance of ageing, some employers don’t like to take on staff beyond a certain (sometimes very low) age limit, and it appears that the older you are the less relevant you and your opinions become.  Old and young have little interaction, and the divide is then further widened by the creation of stereotypes from perceptions based on that isolation.

I know from changes in my own life over the course of time, that even reaching middle-age can lead to viewing bygone days with an exaggerated halcyon glow.  But to discount all of that life experience when you are young and have virtually none, seems like utter madness.  When one looks at the universe, one observes that change is really the only constant.  Change can be uncomfortable, but there is little growth without it.  Sometimes what appears to be new and exciting or ‘different,’ is however just something from the past dressed up in new clothes.  Those who are students of history or have lived long enough to see how cyclical human civilization can be, are often instinctively aware of this.  Centuries come and go, but human beings have the same needs, drives, faults and failings.

In traditional oriental cultures, older people are frequently treated with reverence and awe.  Folk realise they have something to offer that cannot be taught in a classroom, or obtained by any other means than the life each represents.  Every older person is a repository of knowledge, wisdom, and individual experience of history within that culture.
Sometimes after visiting such cultures, a traveller may comment at how backwards they are and that nothing has changed there for generations.  Could it be that they have embraced and incorporated the wisdom of their elders, and avoided fighting the same wars and struggles with newer weapons and different names as other cultures have done?  Perhaps in that regard change is an illusion, and the old saw ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same,’ has an additional hidden message for us?​
If we were to make the same choice and accord our elders a little more respect, maybe we could step off the cyclical wheel of history.  Folks, it’s time to take a tangent.
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Recently I read an on-line thread where people of various ages and experiences were discussing Winston Churchill and the sacrifices made for freedom in the last world war.  A couple of nineteen year-old contributors stated that a war and person from seventy years ago had absolutely no relevance to their lives today.  Whether or not the tone of their comments was meant to be disrespectful, it still shows the same disconnection that makes Santayana’s quote so sadly timeless.  Within twenty years we will pretty much lose the last of the World War 2 veterans.  Could it be that despite the fact new technology and young people intimidate them, they have something of value to offer this world that nobody else can?

At school, we were taught to research information from as many sources as possible when writing essays or making important decisions.  In those pre-Internet days, this largely came down to visiting libraries and museums, and (ideally) meeting somebody who had lived through said era if the topic was recent enough.  We weren't bombarded with information, but then it also wasn't available in bite-sized chunks and vapid sound-bites or memes.  You actually had to take time to read a lot of material, which gave you a much broader understanding of the topic.
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The future belongs to the young, but it was given to us by the old.  We only have them with us for a while, and when they are gone this world loses a lot.  Here’s hoping our culture will finally learn to fill-in the ‘age gap,’ for the benefit of all.