Tim's Tales: 'We are all here. We are all important'

It’s that feeling when you are in a place, usually historical, a castle for example, or an old house or walking amidst the buildings of an old town, and you can feel the presence of people who are long dead who once stood in the same place.

I remember sensing it when I visited Holyrood Palace on a primary school trip, and being in the very space where the heinous murder of Darnley took place.

Of course, knowing about the gruesome details beforehand help my imagination to conjure a sense of history. My spine literally shivered.

But you don’t need to know who the ancestors of a place were to feel their presence.

I walk past Preston Tower almost every day and, while there are records of the Hamiltons who lived there, it’s often the unnamed servants I wonder about; I see them in my imagination scurrying about the very ground I walk on with my kids to and from school.

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As I have got older, I have come to realise that this sense of history is something that we experience on a personal level too.

Maybe it’s because I live in an area of my childhood upbringing, so I’m constantly walking in my own past footprints; I can’t turn a corner without seeing a scene from my childhood before me.

I can’t remember having these constant flashbacks when I was younger.

Of course, I had less personal history to remember then, but also I think as you get older your mind begins to re-run long forgotten memories in ways it didn’t before.

It feels like my mind has developed my own history documentary, full of little snippets of the past.

Moments like when the chain came off my bike on the Greenhills, or when I dropped my ice cream in the sand at North Berwick, or standing in the playground talking about football, in the same spot I now wait for my younger kids to come out of school.

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I was talking about football but hoping it wouldn’t be discovered that I was just recanting some lines I’d memorised from Saturday’s Grandstand!

It’s so random and there are literally hundreds of these tiny moments of my life that for some reason my brain has decided to constantly remind me of.

It’s like flashbacks, not of traumatic events but rather simple, everyday ones.

I’m sure this is common, but it’s left me wondering what to do with these countless tiny memories that flood my mind.

They root me in place and often make me smile. But do I share them with my kids? Do I write them down?

Then I realised something: I have done reminiscence work in the past, now I’m reaching that stage in life where I’m doing it on a personal level, or rather my subconscious is, as if it’s saying to me, it’s time to gather and reflect, and possibly pass on those small and seemingly unimportant details, but which often contain glimpses of myself and the lessons of a life lived.

As a lifelong historian, with a passion for researching the past and developing stories from it, I’ve realised that I’ve reached a point where I myself have become a primary source for evidencing the past. I mean, I was there.

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My past is one my loved ones are personally connected to, because my memories are part of my children’s ancestral heritage.

Even the tales such as the lost ice cream at North Berwick, which fell over 50 years ago, on the same spot my children picnicked on the beach last summer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “...man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world...”

We all are. We are all important.

In this world, where grotesque men of power and privilege steal the spotlight of attention and turn history into a celebration of their ego and self-importance, the simple recollections of lives lived without fanfare is an antidote to their theft.

We are all history, and we should share ours with whoever matters to us.

I will leave the last words to Robert Fulghum, who wrote the book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. It’s a book I think we should all read if we have the time.

“Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.”