Tag Archives: family

The Old Railway Line

There’s an old railway line near my house which has been converted into a path. I walk the dog there every day.

It’s a little strip of countryside that runs through the middle of the town, and it’s used by everyone. Families with children in prams and pushchairs, joggers and runners, couples strolling hand in hand…

People ride horses and bikes down the track. Teenagers sit on the benches and chat, children run around on the grass, or play hide and seek among the trees, or kick a football at each other.

What’s interesting is nobody ever has ever said that this is what the path is for.

There are no signs with instructions on how to take a walk or play a game or simply enjoy the fresh air. Okay, there are signs saying motorbikes aren’t allowed and not to leave any dog waste, but that’s about it. There are only instructions on what not do. Nobody tells you to walk slowly in the sunshine, or to breathe in the scent of the balsam poplar, or to look out for the blossom on the trees.

There aren’t even any adverts telling you that the path is there. There have been no media campaigns encouraging people to go for a walk, no celebrity endorsements, no tee shirts, no merch. Nothing. I see adverts on TV all the time telling me that there is an exciting football match coming up, that I will feel moved by watching it and how drinking a certain brand of beer will maximise my enjoyment of the game. How people are able to find the path all by themselves and make good use of it without the resources of a marketing department is a mystery to me.

It reminds me of the bad old days when I started teaching. Parents would choose to send their children to a school by relying on word of mouth and looking at the exam results. By the time I finished we had a marketing manager on a higher salary than the teachers.

Okay, we had less money to spend on the children, but I think we can all agree it was money well spent. How else would parents know that year 11 played a game of football last week?

In my opinion, marketing is just a way of distracting people from what’s really worthwhile. Keep people’s eyes on glossy pictures and tweets and soundbites and they’ll walk right by the lovely footpaths just a few yards from their doorsteps.

How it works

Last night I did something I haven’t done for over fifty years. I watched a moon rocket take off.

I’d forgotten just how exciting it was.

I only just remember seeing the moon landings. I was three years old when my parents woke me in the middle of the night. They brought me through to the little black and white TV in the lounge to see Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. I was tired, I wanted to go back to bed, but my parents refused. They said I would remember this. They were right. I don’t remember very many other things from that age1.

I quickly grew to love rockets, though. They were on the television all the time, both real ones and pretend ones like Thunderbird 3. Everyone I knew, it seemed, had the Airfix Saturn V kit. I knew (or I thought I knew) everything about rockets. I was surprised, watching the TV last night, just how much the presenters were having to explain. About countdowns and separation and launch delays.

But of course, people nowadays don’t have the advantage of Ladybird books, in particular ‘How it works’ THE ROCKET2. I went and found my copy this morning. There’s a photograph of it at the top of this post. This is a book from a very different time, when six year olds were expected to read about Newton’s third law of Motion (see page 8).

Looking back, it seems as if they were launching rockets every week in the early 70s (I know they weren’t, but I was very young.) I quickly got bored with launches and discovered other things to be obsessed with, like trains and lego.

The trouble was, space exploration was an every day thing to me. It had been part of my world for as long as I could remember. Literally

But watching Artemis II lift off last night, I remembered just how exciting rockets were. There was the countdown. Countdowns are exciting, every writer knows that. Even Mr Spoon knows that. I watched on and off throughout the evening, watched the astronauts being fastened in, listened to the back and forth at launch control. I was there for the breathless pause at minus ten minutes when it looked as if things weren’t going ahead, I felt excitement at the resumption of the count…

And finally, the lift off. Watching that ship climbing into the sky (it seemed to rise much faster then I remembered) the sheer visible power of the thing, the thought that four people are leaving our planet… I was surprised how moved I was. I’d forgotten what it was like.

I remembered why I became an SF writer

Every so often I’m reminded that we live in the age of miracles.
I wonder how long it will be before we take it for granted again?

  1. I do remember the BBC News leading with the Beatles breaking up. I’m not sure I knew who the Beatles were at the time ↩︎
  2. If you like Ladybird books and you live near Cambridge you might want to visit The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists Exhibition ↩︎

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