Real life melodrama

My history research continues. I'm just the tiniest bit worried about how much I am enjoying it - and how compulsive it is. Not only thrill of the chase, but also the outlines of some pretty full-on real life melodrama.

A sneak-peek:

Sometime early last century, a fine upstanding gentleman of the family left a modest amount of money to his beloved wife and child, his share of the family business to his siblings... and the rather more sizeable bulk of his estate to a Miss X. Not unnaturally, his sorrowing widow contested the will, unsuccessfully. Miss X even had what the temerity (as the widow might have phrased it) to insert a memorial notice in the relevant paper. Thus the memorial notices are from his widow and child, his siblings, and his.... dear friend.

It only needs for me to find out she was his secretary as well as his dear friend. Ah...real life melodrama: if I put it in a novel, you'd say it was far-fetched.

This is post 41 of 43 posts.

Food for thought

We've been cooking up a storm today, or at least some scones and hearty winter stews. There is enormous satisfaction to be had from several tupperware containers full of delicious and healthy food. Especially warm food that can quickly reheated and still taste 'just cooked' on cold Melbourne winter weeknights!

The delight Mr O and I took in the sight of our bounty had me thinking about our forbears. If we are thrilled by knowing there is food in our cupboards and freezers (even though the shops are just a few hundred metres up the road), how much more intense must have been the feelings of the local goodman and goodwife when the crops were in the barn, the pig slaughtered and salted, and the fruits preserved against the winter to come? Not only would the sight of all that food delight the eye (and eventually the stomach) but they would have the satisfaction of knowing the family would make it through the winter.

That is an intensity of feeling I am unlikely to experience, but then I'm not likely to experience famine either, so that seems fair - you can't have one without the other. I recall that in some famines, you couldn't buy bread with a gold bar because there was no bread (or grain) to buy within reach. Lacking modern transportation, a famine which affected an area of a couple of hundred miles was affecting the whole of your reachable world.

It must have been meaningless to many of our forbears to even dream of 'life satisfaction' or 'self-actualization' (in whatever terms they would have used) with the possibility of death from starvation a real and present danger. Food for thought, that.

This is post 97 of 100 posts in 100 days.