LEGACY OF FEAR

Most of us would prob­a­bly agree that liv­ing a good life is all about look­ing ahead, mov­ing for­ward, and not dwelling on the past. Yet an in­evitable part of get­ting older is look­ing back over the years and weigh­ing up the highs and the lows, savour­ing the good mem­o­ries and re­gret­ting the bad. Then there is the issue of legacy. As we hur­tle to­wards our final de­par­ture that too creeps into one’s think­ing: what mark will I leave on the world? It is not an easy ques­tion and what makes it harder is that the an­swer won’t sit still.

Take Christo­pher Colum­bus. Not so long ago his legacy seemed se­cure as the cel­e­brated dis­cov­erer of Amer­ica, a great man whose achieve­ments cul­mi­nated in the forg­ing of the USA, a bea­con of free­dom and democ­racy. You can find his statue stand­ing proudly atop a grand col­umn near Barcelona’s seafront. Yet today, Colum­bus is more likely to be dis­missed as an evil colo­nial­ist slaver pre­pared to sub­ju­gate and con­demn en­tire pop­u­la­tions for power and fi­nan­cial gain. It’s not hard to imag­ine that statue being taken down at some point. And even re­in­stated should so­ci­ety change its opin­ion.

Legacy is a slip­pery sub­ject and I can’t help won­der­ing how fu­ture gen­er­a­tions will re­mem­ber me when I fi­nally shuf­fle off this mor­tal coil. I have no doubt there are some peo­ple read­ing this - cyn­ics and smart alecs - who will say: “Neil, they won’t re­mem­ber you at all”. Well let me tell those peo­ple - who I un­der­stand are prob­a­bly deal­ing with is­sues - that one thing I have done to make a con­tri­bu­tion to my legacy is change the very cul­tural fab­ric of the vil­lage where I live, per­haps not for­ever but with­out doubt for the bet­ter.

When I came to live in this vil­lage of less than a hun­dred souls over a dozen years ago, Oc­to­ber 31 was just an­other day. It’s true that it co­in­cided with La Cas­tanyada, Cat­alo­nia’s an­nual au­tumn fes­ti­val de­voted to chest­nuts, and don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of roast chest­nuts, but they’re not par­tic­u­larly ex­cit­ing, es­pe­cially if you’re a kid. What kids like is dress­ing up and kids like sweets, which is why they love Hal­loween.

Our first Hal­loween in the vil­lage saw me tak­ing my two kids, one dressed as a vam­pire the other as a witch, from house to house with a bas­ket, knock­ing on doors and then threat­en­ing the be­mused neigh­bours with mis­chief if they didn’t hand over some ed­i­ble good­ies. It was the first time any­one had ever tricked or treated in the his­tory of the vil­lage. It would not be the last. The fol­low­ing year there were four or five kids, the year after that seven or eight, by the third year the score of kids who lived in the vil­lage were all dressed up and trick­ing and treat­ing like the best of them.

Many Hal­loweens later, my chil­dren are now 19 and 17 and they no longer dress up or trick and treat, but come Oc­to­ber 31 I can as­sure you that I will have plenty of sweets ready in the hall, wait­ing for the likes of Franken­stein’s mon­ster and the Mummy to ring my door­bell.

I wouldn’t be sur­prised if one day I ended up as a statue on top of a col­umn in the vil­lage square.

opin­ion