Nothing Lasts Forever

As I've mentioned here a few times, today is Renewal Day - the alien new year. May it be a good one for you all.

I was in a rather unhappy mood this morning, having problems with my iPhone again. I was trying to sync it up with iTunes and it just froze up on me after a while. Long term readers will remember that I've had problems like this before, but a full restore managed to cure things this time around. Still, it took quite a while to refill the phone with all my music, apps, podcasts etc... time I spent watching Jamiroquai videos on YouTube, which cheered me up a bit. Many thanks to the lovely lady who sent me the link to one of JK's finest - she knows who she is :) x

The iPhone troubles wouldn't have been so bad in isolation, but coming on top of my sleeping pattern being so screwed up - and me feeling so screwed up - well, it all started to get on top of me a bit. Not to mention certain other issues which have been discussed on here far too often already.

As it was a nice afternoon, I decided I'd go for a walk along the city streets, and ended up walking all the way into the city core. It was nice, just me and my iPhone, and I was deliberately choosing to walk through quiet (upmarket) residential areas and along main roads. And I began to imagine myself doing this through the streets of Milton Keynes of an afternoon, and wondering what that would be like.

Even so, there was still the annoyances of, amongst others, the idiots who tried to accelerate into me as I was passing a petrol station (and then laughing about it) to say nothing of the lowlife scum who I have the misfortune of living next to. Honestly, you sometimes wish the terrorists would bomb this place instead - although I doubt even bin Laden's lot would waste good explosives on this place.

I found myself in the city core and after buying something to drink (and using the self-checkout machines in Boots for the first time - quite easy) I found myself in the nearby graveyard, which is quite a popular place to sit and sometimes picnic (as well as a haunt for the local drunkards, but they were clearly elsewhere today) The tombstones here are quite old - centuries old, and I found myself reading some of them. Some had the deceased's occupation on them as well as the usual details, and I found it quite interesting, and wondered what they'd make of life in 2009?

There's also some stones in the ground marking the burial places of others, who presumably are buried under said stones, perhaps in the crypts of the nearby church. Unfortunately, most of them have had the engravings worn away over the years, and while some were very well made and still quite legible even after a quarter millennium, a lot of them were just blank pieces of stone now. I could see one where the inscriptions were clearly fading, and in another 50 years, or maybe even 20, it'll be blank too.

So I guess I'll never know anything about who was buried there. And what about the tombstones which fall over and break? They don't get replaced if the council can't track down the descendants of the deceased, and after several generations, well, who's gonna care? So, they too get forgotten - lost to history.

But then, nothing lasts forever, does it? And that's probably a good thing - as we look forward to the springtime, and the notional "re-birth" of nature, we ought to remember that something had to die to make way for it.

Happy Renewal Day from the alien amongst you.

ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN - NOTHING LASTS FOREVER
(from the album "Evergreen", 1997)