We’ve just returned from a week-end down in Norwich, attending the wedding of a nephew. It was a truly great event for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that not many years ago we would all have said that it was hard to see that he had any future at all. The common phrase “dysfunctional family” could have been coined specifically to describe his early situation. Incapable parents split up, and he was brought up largely by his grandparents when they were at an age that made it very difficult indeed for them to manage a very disturbed child. His schooling was a mess, for a variety of reasons, and when his grandfather died I became his guardian (assisted and supported very ably by the family of one of his grandparents’ neighbours). His teenage years were pretty well a total disaster from almost every point of view, culminating in a short period in prison.
Then things began to turn around. He has a good job, a professional qualification, and now a great wife. The wedding seemed to be much more than just a wedding, but the celebration of his ultimate triumph over that dreadful background of adversity. Somehow it felt to me to be appropriate that the wedding was held in the tremendous Norman keep of Norwich Castle. It is hard to think of any other venue that could better symbolise permanence and security. He really does have a future after many years in which all of us asked ourselves whether he could have one.
At a much more banal level I too am discovering that I have a future. The wedding has constituted a kind of time-horizon for some weeks past, and before dinner tonight I sat down and was able to draw up a list of all those things now waiting to be done. The list for tomorrow alone already contains ten items …. and that doesn’t include preparation in various forms for my trip to Italy in ten days’ time.
Incidentally, the trip across East Anglia to Norwich and back has left us both in a state of some weariness. There are almost no modern roads, and the routes there are at this time of the year are crowded with tourists heading for the North Norfolk coast, and trucks full of agricultural produce. It always reminds me of the stories I have read of Italian intellectuals critical of Mussolini’s regime, who were sentenced to periods of confino, or internal exile, in remote regions of the south. If ever I were to want to punish anybody in this country in that way, this is the region in which they would be condemned to live. Now that would be an experience in which anybody could be forgiven for doubting that there is a future!