There hasn't been any blog activity in the last few months I know, and there's a good reason for that.
Way back in March I went on a long holiday...back a few weeks and off again...and ...wait for it ... off again. Lately, it feels as if I've been out of the country more than I've been in it.
In the last few months I've visited more countries, albeit briefly, than during the whole of the rest of my earlier life.
That started me thinking about how the world is so much smaller than it used to be.
I know it's a daft notion, but it really does seem that way to me.
When you think about it, these days you can get to just about anywhere in the world in a day.
Okay, I know there are some remote parts of the planet where you'd have to track the final few hundred miles, but, generally speaking we can jump on a plane and go more or less wherever we please fairly easily.
Our ancestors weren't so lucky were they.
I've been reading a little about the coffin ships that took people from Ireland to Canada via Liverpool during the time of the great famine in the 1840s.
Taxes imposed upon the gentry, to help support the people who lived on their land, made some landowners think that it would be cheaper for them to pay for a ticket to send their tenants from Ireland to North America. As a result, there was an increase in immigration. Ships were overcrowded and many of the passengers, already weakened by famine, died during the voyage when illness broke out, typhoid being a major cause of death.
I can't imagine the despair those people must have felt, being crammed together below deck with a couple of hundred other people. How their hopes for a better future must have turned to fear as they watched their fellow passengers begin to fall ill and die around them. How they must have yearned to return to their former homes, even if it was to die and to be buried there.
As always, in delving into the past, I find I am fascinated by the lives of those who went before me.
This month of November is National Novel Writing Month - NANOWRIMO - and so I've decided to use my family history research to write a story based (loosely) on what I know of my ancestors. NANOWRIMO requires writers to just write...turn off your inner editor and write 50,000 words during the month of November. It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be written.
I can do that.
