A Feeling of Home

At this time of year, we are inclined to look back on what we achieved over the outgoing year and make some new resolutions for the coming one.
I have been travelling a lot in 2019 and the one thing which stands out for me is that I had the feeling of coming home each time I returned to my little apartment. I have been out of Ireland for most of my life, first in London and then in Germany in a small town close to Frankfurt. I never called anywhere home, or if I did, I did not mean it in the sense of belonging somewhere. Neil Diamond's song I am, I said, has always resonated with me. So it is nice, not to say heartwarming, to find a place I can feel at home in.
Not that I regret travelling. I met so many fascinating people and worked in so many interesting jobs over the years and I wouldn't miss that for the world.
This afternoon I am going to see  Little Women in the local cinema with supper afterwards. I am looking forward to that.
I wish all my readers a very Happy New Year!

The Art of Conversation

'My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation', so says Anne Elliot in Jane Austen's Persuasion. I am inclined to agree with her but also to agree with Mr. Elliot when he replies: 'that is not good company, that is the best'. When reading these words (re-reading actually since I have read all of Ms Austen's novels except Northanger Abbey at least twenty times or more), I could not help thinking that these sentiments were also Jane Austen's own. I would love to have been able to sit down and talk to her, because although her life was fairly confined, she had a deep interest and understanding of her fellow human beings. She found much to laugh at and much to admire and was well aware of her own critical attitude. I think that is why her novels still have such general appeal.
Conversation is an art in itself and good conversation is as rare today as it was in Ms Austen's time - if not rarer. In bygone days there was no television, no podcasts, no mobile phones. Entertainment and news were mainly distributed by word of mouth. Dinner parties were the thing as far as entertainment went, dinners and balls in the winter and the resultant gossip they produced were the equivalent of Instagram, Twitter and FaceBook today. The major difference lies in the fact that conversation with other people who have news/gossip/information to give, has to be ten times more entertaining than reading the display on a mobile. The younger generation would never believe this, I think. I have often seen groups of them sitting in cafes and all of them are immersed in their phones. Not a word is spoken among them. My only hope is that, one day in the future, people will wake up to the fact that other people are fascinating, that hearing someone talk about what they have experienced, where they have been, what they have worked at, beats thumbing through Tweets or Posts on your mobile.