Paths - One Road

Throughout our adult lives we follow paths based on our choices. We reach cross-roads and face directional dilemmas. There can be consequences for a bad decision. A learning curve. We cross paths with others and share paths with many. My late dad and I shared a saying for these experiences, “Another stitch in life’s rich tapestry”. The saying often related to a conclusion or something that we considered to be “Sod’s Law”. I still say it. We travelled many paths together. I was always Daddy’s Girl and spent my childhood living in his shadow. He showed me the way to find the right path then, with the patience of a saint, helped me to stay on it after I’d veered right off.

One Road, a song by Love Affair

I don't have your nagging doubts
I know what you're going through
So if it helps you to decide One road leads to sadness
One road leads to pain
One road shows you life is a game One road leads to darkness
One road leads to light
One road leads you life to love I don't want you to be confused
Or demoralized or abused
I just want you free to choose
Who you want to have or loose
So if it helps you to decide One road leads to darkness
One road leads to light
And one road leads you life to love You know one road leads to sadness
One road leads to pain
And one road shows you life is a game, yeah Oh, one road leads to darkness
And one road leads to light
And one road leads you life to love.

Written by Philip Goodhand-Tait

This song was a popular choice on our pub juke-box at the time, and a personal favourite.

I’ve tried to be a good guiding light to my children and grandchildren, but I lack my dad’s level of tolerance.

In a more literal sense, my husband and I are currently travelling unfamiliar paths in the Channel Islands. We’re having an adventure while we can just about do it, physically. Using a wheely walker on cobbled, hilly paths has some challenges and driving narrow roads with no clue to the destination brings surprises. Already familiar with Jersey, we’re staying in Guernsey and looking forward to visiting Sark and Herm.

This poem must be included in this week’s theme,

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost 1874 - 1963

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Quartet - The Brontes

The story of Jane Eyre was my first introduction to the Bronte family.  Charlotte’s famous novel has been serialised on television many times, and I think this would be the 1963 adaptation starring Richard Leech and Ann Bell, shown on Sunday afternoons, as that fits in with my life and being age eight or nine at the time. I was spellbound. I cried when Jane’s school friend, Helen died. I was scared by Bertha, Mr Rochester’s wife and the house fire. My mother bought me the book and encouraged my interest in the Brontes. An interest which remains. I love my visits to Haworth Parsonage.

It isn’t only the novels and poetry that mean so much to me. I’m fascinated by the family and the tragedies they endured. The author Lynne Reid Banks tells their story very well in her books, ‘Dark Quartet’ and ‘Path to the Silent Country’. Writer Sally Wainwright’s drama, ‘To Walk Invisible’ is a written work of art and I believe is as close to the truth as it is possible to be. Branwell’s downfall, Emily’s impatience with him, Charlotte’s forthright dynamics in pushing for publication for all of them and Anne, gentle mannered and sweet natured; all of them incredibly talented in their pursuits.  It is so sad that they had such short lives and they have no descendants, unless it should come to pass that Branwell actually did father a child in Kendal c.1840. It might be a rumour based on his boasting and we may never know.

Poor Branwell, a troubled soul, poet and artist. His poems are melancholic and he painted himself out of the famous painting he did of himself with his sisters.  I don’t think he felt like he was living in the shadow of his sisters, as it has been suggested.  He was equally talented, but enjoyed being ‘a lad’ a lazy one, and pushing boundaries too far. It seems he was his own worst enemy in allowing distractions to prevent him from reaching his potential success.

This quartet was once a group of six siblings. Two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth died aged eleven and ten, around the same time as each other, of consumption, when Charlotte was nine. Imagine, had they lived, what they might have written.

Patrick Branwell Bronte

Poet and artist, your fallen talents go to waste
And are trapped within the torment of your mind.
Forbidden love, so heavenly to taste
Now haunts and disturbs; no beauty left to find.
The call of temptation and no wish to be chaste,
But to be drunk on the perfume of bodies entwined.
Oh Branwell! Your vision clouded by opium and gin
And the burdening weight of adulterous sin…

Pamela Winning 2010

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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