RESOLUTION

Time will tell if I can keep on keep­ing on, but my weekly 2019 pod­casts have begun. Whether it is just me or you share my sense that this year will be defin­ing in a fist­ful of ways, I have re­solved to try and record it.

Under the title of “Where I Stand” my focus is on the tan­gi­ble, the re­al­i­ties of home, a vital bal­ance to the fre­quently un­man­age­able tor­rent of news. I will tell of the rhythms of our days and of this moun­tain val­ley in the Pri­o­rat, com­pli­ment­ing the words I offer in Cat­alo­nia Today; of sea­sons, storms and fruit­ing, and of our cease­less en­deav­our to ground our­selves. I will relay as best I can a sense of the cul­ture, the na­ture, and the im­pact of – and my opin­ion on - events in the wider world. As I said, it is very much an ac­count of where I stand, how I set my feet and seek to bal­ance all that comes to bear.

My quest for rea­son­ing, or sim­ply record­ing, is rooted in the riches of na­ture, love, friend­ship and democ­racy, and the need to re­mind my­self of their im­por­tance, to bear up, to be as pos­i­tive as I can.

And there is im­me­di­ately, in di­rect re­la­tion to these ap­pre­ci­a­tions, an­other, spe­cific New Year’s res­o­lu­tion.

I am some­times ad­dressed as Mr Whit­man. I never ob­ject. My North Amer­i­can-born part­ner is Mag­gie Whit­man. I could not be more proud or happy about that.

Whether in the root ball of his­tory there is any link what­so­ever to Walt Whit­man we may never know, but, bizarrely, there is a co­in­ci­dence, a fin­ger­tip touch on my fam­ily’s side with Amer­ica’s world poet who was born 200 years ago. This, along with a fas­ci­na­tion with his epic work, Leaves of Grass, and his ap­pre­ci­a­tion of – yes – na­ture, love, friend­ship and democ­racy, com­pels me in this an­niver­sary year to solve the puz­zle.

Walt Whit­man’s Eng­lish an­ces­tor was John Whit­man, born and bap­tised in 1598 in the small mar­ket town of Holt in the east coast county of Nor­folk.

He was from a Pu­ri­tan fam­ily and sailed west in the 1630s, away from the po­lit­i­cal and re­li­gious ten­sions of Eng­land in the pre-civil war reign of Charles I, to the New World, liv­ing in the set­tle­ment of Wey­mouth in what would be­come Nor­folk County, Mass­a­chu­setts. He had gone ahead and left his wife Ruth and their chil­dren, and they are be­lieved to have joined him more than a decade later, to find he had es­tab­lished a farm and be­come a lead­ing mem­ber of the com­mu­nity.

My en­deav­our is to find out more about John Whit­man’s Eng­lish roots and about his fa­ther Zachariah, who may also have trav­elled to Amer­ica.

Why the in­trigue? Holt is my home town, where my fa­ther grew up too, where Dad lived for most of his life and where we laid him to rest in the ceme­tery seven years ago.

My quest is to find out if any of the Whit­man’s lie there, to dis­cover the de­tail of the Whit­man con­nec­tion to Holt four hun­dred years ago.

These are among other seeds from the cor­ner of Eng­land where I was born, blown across the At­lantic – a deep as­so­ci­a­tion that also in­cludes the fam­ily trees of Abra­ham Lin­coln, Thomas Paine and George Van­cou­ver.

As for Leaves of Grass, I won­der how many of you have read this vast chron­i­cle of a life, a mon­u­men­tal and chal­leng­ing vol­ume in which I am still knee-deep. I can only man­age it is small doses with long wild walks in be­tween. But on I go, into the pep­per wind of win­ter, res­olutely fac­ing the year with op­ti­mism, the only way.

Na­ture, love, friend­ship and democ­racy.