I work late at night and then when i go to bed sometimes it takes a while to settle, thoughts, characters, story-lines still running, plus all the day thoughts from what we’ve done! So I suppose it’s not surprising that I’m not up at six o’clock when I used to go to work. Although teaching didn’t start until nine, and school was only ten minutes away, I liked to arrive early. I liked to have time at home pottering about, doing a little writing, having breakfast, getting my things together, and then at school I liked a coffee, a chat with colleagues, a time to sort and organize my classroom, to do other little chores, to ready myself for the day ahead. Now when I do get up, after a very big cup of tea, it is straight here to work, on WordPress, on my story, catching up with on-line chums, and it is only an hour or so later that I go downstairs for breakfast and coffee.
Although it was only just before nine when I eventually got up today, it was still very dark outside, and even as it got towards ten, it was still gloomy and dull. I thought about when I was at work.At this time of year I would arrive in the complete dark, the street lights on; gradually more light would come into the sky, and up on the fourth floor, our staff room facing east, we could watch the sun hoist itself up over the Mendip Hills, sometimes in a spectacular show of colour, sometimes we only knew it was there behind a bank of cloud or fog because the cloud or fog would change from black to grey to white. Lights would be on in the classroom, maybe all day, but certainly if they went off in the morning,they would be on again in the afternoon, and we would go home in the dark.
Having written about the agricultural and rural stories of Mrs Sue Robb in Northern Ireland, stories going back to the beginning of the twentieth century, it made me ponder on how lucky we are with our touch of a switch illumination. In the old days they would be trying to strike matches with cold fingers, to light a candle or oil lamp – my mum who was born in 1925 had oil lamps as a child, right through to the late 1930’s. Going down to the cowshed to work before dawn there would be lanterns and lamps, but used sparingly because candles and oil cost money, nothing could be wasted, not even light.
Thinking back to earlier times, even a couple of hundred years ago, there were no matches, only a flint and steel; no doubt a fire would be carefully kept going, and spills could take a light and use it for candles; poor people would maybe had little oil lamps, of a sort going back thousands of years, fat or oil in a little jug like object with a wick. The poorest would get up in the dark and fumble their way around, I guess.
These thoughts must be pretty amusing for people who live further north, when sometimes daylight is only a couple of hours, or maybe only a pale few minutes!
Lois Elsden 