Autobiographies
I’m not quite sure what got into me last Friday.
For some reason it just crossed my mind that it might be an idea to put pen to paper [as it were] and give a little insight into how things were when I was growing up. Television seemed as good an idea as any to start with as there is one in front of me as I type. It’s one of those large flat-screen high definition yokes that has access to literally hundreds, if not thousands of channels. It’s rarely used as Herself has a slightly smaller one which we watch. But where it now stands, there was once a 405-line VHF monochrome set with only one clear channel, mono sound and no remote control. How times change?
The little exercise which I inflicted on the world over the last few days is also part of a thought that has been running [rambling?] through my head for a while. There are many things I never asked my father about. I never really quizzed him about his childhood and now all my questions remain unanswered. Will the time come when the Grandkids have the same problem? Will they have questions that I can no longer answer?
It occurred to me to write my biography.
The problem with an autobiography is that nobody would be really desperate enough to read the story of an ordinary[ish] Irish bloke who never did anything famous and whose name doesn’t even appear on Google. It would be for the Grandkids only, and the chances are that they would never read it, so it would be a massive waste of effort.
One solution is to break my life up into segments and write about each. My life could be broken up into a weird sort of overlapping Venn Diagrams such as Pre-18, Post-18 [18 was a significant year], Unmarried, Married, Television, Computers and Retirement. Some of those would be intensely boring but some might have a passing interest. The yokes what I writ in the last four days could be padded out a bit as there were quite a few escapades left out for the sake of brevity.
The Computers chapters would be mainly about my working in the main RTE campus [as distinct from being shifted around in the cable television area]. The problem is that it’s naturally a quasi-technical subject and I would have to work hard to make it interesting enough for even me to read. I do have the advantage that most of the people involved in those years are now dead or senile [or both] so there’s little chance of ending up in court.
So maybe I will give Computers a bash? A handful of you have expressed an interest so maybe it’s worth a try?
There’s fuck all else to write about anyway.
Do it, I don't know nearly enough about my late father's life.
I wrote a similar piece detailing all the minutiae of daily life in the 1950s to mid-60s. It had occurred to me that no-one ever describes the everyday issues like shopping, diet, transport, healthcare, neighbourhood, culture etc. in those now far-off days of relative poverty.
I wrote it for future generations, including lots of personality details of family members and descriptions of our house, its layout, equipment etc.
Re-reading it merely emphasises how much has changed, both materially and culturally in the last 60 years. Enjoy writing yours, I recommend it to anyone.
"I wrote a similar piece" Where? Don't be coy.
Not coy, it's not published, it's just for family archive/history purposes after my memory is no longer available – I think everyone I've libelled is already dead, but you can't be too careful. It's already 32 pages, 23,000 characters long, I keep adding to it whenever I think of another aspect of my early life to describe/contrast.
Chicken! Mind you, you only have a quarter of it done [assuming an editor doesn't slash out a few pages and assuming you mean 23,000 words not characters] so keep going.
If you don't mind could you do a short comparison on the reach of the state into your life when you were chasing women round Dublin and its reach when you retired?
I'm interested simply because almost all I know about Ireland has come to me through the media goggles save what I have found out from your scribbles.I trust you over any media mouthpiece/scribbler every time.
Write it. Your grandchildren will love it. But maybe not until later in life.
When you are young you are too busy, but later you wonder how you got there.
Look at the success of Ancestry and all the find-out-who-you-are programmes.
The other reason is to get your side of the story on record in case some rat decides that you were evil, owned slaves, abused your children, or were part of an evil state propaganda machine.
Please write it.
I regret that I never asked my father sufficient questions about his 'first life': married with no children, but as he was 50 when I popped out (with his 2nd wife), he had had a whole life before about which I know very little.
Now my daughters and grandsons want to know about him and I lack too many details.
They do like the few facts I know: he was 2 when Victoria died, fought in WW1 in the RFC and was a 'Captain Mainwearing' in WW2!
I'm interested. So you have at least one reader outside your family.
There are so many things I wish I asked my Father, now, when its too late. So write that autobiography, especially the programming bit, as programming is the career I eventually fell into.
I'd be fascinated – so there's another keenly (and hopefully) anticipating to add to the growing list.
Okay. It's with the design engineers. If they produce anything it will go to the manufacturers. Assuming they do their stuff the components will be assembled in the Assembly Tower [where else?] and the final result will then be rolled out to the launch pad. All going well, I reckon on about fifteen years to launch?