John Wheater 21Dec24 (this page updated 30Nov05)

Introduction

Many old chaps like to write their memoirs, and mostly think they can write interestingly. I've become part of this group since retirement, and notice that these days you can in a way publish the results using the web.

This you see now is part of my very own public (and private) place.

Public because anyone can see it; but private in a way, because no-one but I can change it; private also because no-one will see it except by invitation. The web's a pub and private place, but none I think do there embrace.

If this is untrue, and you have found your way here independently, do let me know . I always like to hear, especially now I have endless time.

[Brian Miller said that no-one has endless time, but I countered by citing Wittgenstein, that "Death is not an event in life";. Discuss]

So as it's my space, I can use it for whatever I like, subject to the rules of the service provider and the law.

Each of us finds his own life extraordinarily interesting, and anything interesting demands expression.  That’s why we have to suffer those grim Christmas summaries that people love to write but nobody reads.

So, while you’re bound to feel guilty if you inflict a GCS on people, with your very own web space you can do the same thing, indulge in as much self-expression as you like, and be free of guilt.

Guilt-free because no-one has your stuff deliberately inflicted on them.  If it turns out that you have after all got something interesting to say, then you’re still not at fault, because people will read it voluntarily.

Here are a couple of quotes on this very matter:

In order to write one's reminiscences it is not at all necessary to be a great man, nor a notorious criminal, nor a celebrated artist, nor a statesman - it is quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell, and not merely desire to tell it but at least have some little ability to do so.

Every life is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, the life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another's heart, and to listen to its beating...he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks for himself confirmation, sympathy, justification...

But may not memoirs be tedious, may not the life described be colourless an commonplace?

Then we shall not read it - there is no worse punishment for a book than that.

Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, quoted by James Lees-Milne (his ellipses) in Ancient as the Hills, John Murray, 1997.
(I shall have something to say about J.L-M in my books page). For now, this is good place.

The other quote is from Coleridge, but I can't find it.

Here is who I am:

• I was born in 1933, the year the German Leader came to power and inaugurated the Third Empire. Twelve years seems such a short time for all that to have happened. I am writing in 2003, and, since 1991, well, thirty million have not been killed in combat and neither have six million been put to death by their own government.
• I retired in April 2003 as the oldest programmer in the world, serving 41 years, from Pegasus Assembly to C++.
• I suffer from a stammer, sometimes severe to the point of incoherence, which has had a profound effect on my life.
  As well as being a serious affliction, a stammer is a harmless hobby, and I have more to say on it.

So there are the key elements: age, the war, the long stretch as a technician, and the stammer.
Clothe these bare bones.

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