A Happy New Year to the readers (reader?) of this blog! I trust you have had a festive break with some refreshment with family and friends. A time to reflect, too, and to make resolutions.

All that stuff

I am getting ready to move house early in the New Year and have recently spent many a happy hour / day / week / month sifting through the boxes, trunks and bags in my garage. Why on earth have I kept all those history books from university days, those teaching notes from the early 1980s and all those video cassettes from yesteryear? I accept that I am a bit of a hoarder (I prefer to say that as an historian I’m interested in sifting through the past and everything has a value) but there has to come a limit – and, besides, my wife has ordered me to downsize!

Gifts galore

These thoughts of excess and surplus are, I suppose, natural at Christmas time when most of us will no doubt receive many more presents than we really need or want. As a teacher I am extremely grateful to all those pupils who have given me cards, boxes of chocolates and bottles of wine over the years – but I have to confess to ‘re-gifting’ some of those Belgian sweets and bottles of Scotch. (I know, as a Scot, I really should like whisky!)  On a different scale, but similarly thought-provoking, I read recently that 200,000 books are published annually in the UK. The Times literary editor, Robbie Millen, wrote an exasperated piece asking people to kindly stop sending books to him as he was overwhelmed. Apparently, with so many books clamouring for our attention, it’s much easier to award them ‘nervous little pats on the head rather than to separate wheat from chaff’ (as DJ Taylor has written in the I newspaper). Moreover, there were 821 films on release in the UK last year (equating to 16 per week) and so surely way beyond the capacity of mere mortals, let along film critics, to assimilate, evaluate (or even enjoy)! Perhaps ‘less is more’?

Plastic pollution

I expect that most of us who have seen some of the harrowing images from Blue Planet 2 (and other Nature programmes) will agree that where plastic is concerned, less is indeed more – more sea creatures and, in time, more health for humans, too. A simple walk around our local woodlands or seashore, even a glance in the roadside ditch, reveals extensive amounts of waste and litter. (Can anyone understand the mentality behind those who apparently throw away tin cans and coffee cups with thoughtless abandon?) Less is more beauty and, again, greater health to the planet. The recent Government decision to increase the cost of single-use plastic bags is to be applauded.

Less stuff and more for all

DJ Taylor, in the aforementioned newspaper, commented on a further concern: …the more stuff becomes available the more the overall quality of things on offer starts to sink…the greater the volume of stuff brought before our eyes the less able we are to discriminate between good and bad, to work out what we really want to watch, read or listen to and establish whether it shapes up. Taylor’s advice for a New Year resolution is that we buy less of everything as we may then enjoy what’s left all the more. This seems to me to be a sound approach but I hope it’s not simply for what it might do for ourselves but also for others. One present I particularly appreciated year on year from a parent was this: a donation made (in place of a ‘thing’) in the School’s name to ‘Oxfam unwrapped’ to help pay for a child’s education in a developing part of the world. Here ‘more’ will definitely be ‘more and not less’!”

Every blessing for 2019…