Monday 16 September 2013

THE FORGOTTEN ONES...?


A former residence

A few years ago, a neighbour from hell moved in
next door.  Parties at all hours of the night, people constantly
coming and going accompanied by the continuous clinking of
carry-outs in the early morning - along with shouting, singing,
stomping, screaming, etc.  Luckily, he's now gone and a nice,
respectable young couple have taken up residence.

They've now been there for around three and a half years,
but it seems as if they only moved in fairly recently.  This has
led me to consider the following curious concept which has
recently crept into my consciousness.

There have been a couple of houses in my lifetime in
which we lived for only four years, plus one we occupied for
a mere 15 months, and despite it seeming to me as if we lived
in each of those houses for a good long stretch, I've now started
to wonder if, to our neighbours at the time, it seemed as if we
were merely a temporary blip in their everyday lives.

If my new neighbours' three-and-a-half-year-occupancy
 seems far less to me than it is, then it stands to reason that
the almost similar short periods in which my family resided in
some houses may likewise have appeared to others to be terms
of no consequence.  Are we remembered by name by those we
lived next to, or are we dimly-recalled shadows that barely
register in the histories of some of the areas we stayed?

It's strange to look back on my relatively short time in
those places, and to realise that, although they're well-estab-
lished, carved-in-stone 'epochs' in my life - the details of which
are firmly entrenched in my memory - to those neighbours who
preceded us and remained long past my family's departure, our
time there may be only brief, nearly forgotten interludes in
their overall recollections of events.

Makes you wonder eh?  (Nah, probably
not.  It does with me 'though.) 

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