Once more: keep a diary. Think what a valuable contribution to the story of ours life on this island would be a careful record kept by a farmer, or his wife, from our earliest approach to what was then the EEC, right up to the present uncertainties about common currency: and what not. A real diary, not just account books; family news and parish news and all.
And, in the age of the cheap, never fail camera, what a bonus it would be to have pictures, say, of those huge pyres that blazed and smoked in areas where small fields, bounded by thorns, were levelled to make prairies or mini prairies. And how you'd like to see what those clusters of a few acres looked like a generation ago. You may be looking at the land across 20the river now, and wondering how it is that you can 20forget what it once was.
Such a farm diary could be far more use to the historian of fifty years ahead than stacks of government reports or tomes from Brussels. And what value to the family itself.
Why does this come to mind just now? Because while today, St Valentine's, is important, tomorrow has its own special claims. Tomorrow night fresh fish, caught just an hour, or two before, will be sizzling under grills or on pans: trout. That is, in this eastern region and in some other parts. The fish you buy in shops may have been kept under the most scientific near fresh conditions. But you can't get fresher than those taken an hour or two before, out of a nearby river. And you wonder, too, how many anglers have kept diaries. And can many of them back up their boasting with photographs?
"You don't believe me about that two pounder? Well, here's the proof." Yes, February 15th is some day.