On Things That Happened in the Past

That mighty man, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, recently passed on, having occupied this Earth for just shy of a century. Yet as ancient as he seemed, some of the defining events of the 19XXs were already in the past when he was born. The Great War had been over for three years, the Spanish flu pandemic for one. The Titanic had plunged to the bottom of the Atlantic nine years before. And it was 18 years since the Wright brothers had achieved the world's first winged flight under power.

Those all seem a long time ago now. World Wars One and Two have always seemed a long time ago to me, although they really weren't, if you think about it. Both my parents lived through the latter, and relics of that great conflict were all around me as a child, from the still-derelict bomb sites of central London to the concrete pillboxes and other fortifications that dotted the countryside, to the frequent news reports of unexploded German ordnance being discovered whenever, it seemed, someone dug up a building site or ventured into an infrequently-used cellar. To my parents, the war must often have seemed like it had happened yesterday.

Perhaps it might help if we were to put things into context. This is a game you can play at home, but for convenience' sake we'll use me as our guinea pig. When I was born, World War Two had been over for 21 years; World War One, for 48. Now let's fast forward to the present day and look back. 21 years ago was the year 2000. In that year, Tony Blair was still firmly ensconced in Downing Street, in the second half of his first term as prime minister. The United States couldn't decide who they wanted in charge, until the courts said George W. Bush should get the gig so that his opponent, Al Gore, could have more time to start warning people about climate change. The first permanent crew launched to the International Space Station. And many of us were feeling rather silly about having believed the predictions that we were all going to die because of a computer bug.

OK, on to the other one. 48 years ago was 1973. In that year, the Watergate scandal was in full hue and cry, there was the Yom Kippur War, an oil crisis erupted after the Arab members of OPEC imposed an embargo against countries who'd supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, US troops finally began to leave Vietnam, and Billie Jean King showed Bobby Riggs who was boss on the tennis court. Seems longer ago? Of course, but still relatable to many of us. The smell of the lighting of a candle wick, for example, to me often vividly recalls those oil crisis power cuts.

We might as well do a couple of the Duke's while we're about it. We mentioned that it had been nine years since the sinking of the Titanic when he was born. Nine years ago, for those of you who paid attention in maths, was 2012. That was the year of the London Olympics (episode 3), the movie theatre shooting in Aurora, Colorado, the discovery of the Higgs boson, and a time when many of us were feeling rather silly about having believed the predictions that we were all going to die because of a quirk of an ancient Mesoamerican calendar system.

And eighteen years since the Wright brothers' first flight, which corresponds to 2003, the year of the space shuttle Columbia disaster, the invasion of Iraq, Lance Armstrong's fifth Tour de France win (naughty Lance!), and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, of all people, as the governor of California.

While writing all these down, one thing I noticed was that an awful lot of things have happened since any of the events I mentioned took place. We humans do seem to live at a cracking pace. From the perspective of, say, a Galapagos tortoise, a Greenland shark or a giant sequoia, we really don't stick around that long, but we manage to pack enough in to make it seem longer. We might as well have fun for however long we think we're here, although it's unfortunate that "fun" for a lot of us seems to involve shooting people, burgling your political opponents' offices, filling yourself up with chemicals to win a bike race, or getting inordinately excited over hydrocarbons.

I suppose I really don't have much of a point, except that all this is definitely Something To Think About. It's been about an hour since I started writing this blog post. An hour ago was... lunchtime, now I think about it. As His Royal Highness would have said: well, better bloody get on with it, then.