Dave Barton - The Life Diaries - Explained

Dave Barton - The Life Diaries

WHY
???

A Life Map

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life, or whether that station will be held by anyone else, these pages must show.”

Charles Dickens - David Copperfield

I was born on a Sunday Morning – April 22^nd 1956, in a Maternity Home in Lagos, Nigeria. My mother Dorothy Barton was 34 and my father Thomas was 36 years old. I had a 4 year old sister, Susan. And this was my beginning. As I write it is 58 years since that beginning, and much has happened.  

It is my intention to map out the key events of my life, and in the way of the modern world, commit these reflections to a Blog. Why would you want to tell such a biog you may ask? Well of course many have written their autobiography, so this is nothing particularly new.  But then I am a fairly ordinary man, there is little in the way of celebrity in me, and who I wonder would want to read my reflections on my “life map”.

Recently I indulged in a protracted and intense moment of reflection.  Following the loss of some close friends and colleagues over a short few years, I was feeling my mortality quite keenly.  It was a balmy morning in Kephalonia, I was enjoying my holiday with my wife Janet as we celebrated our 30^th wedding anniversary.  Janet was washing her hair and readying for a day of sitting by the pool and enjoying good food.  I had a glass of cold fresh fruit juice, and I stared from our apartment balcony over the brilliant blue Mediterranean, the fragrances of flowers redolent on the air.

I thought of my book New Nightingales that I had written 4 years early, a diary of my life between 1980 and 1983, cataloguing my experiences as a student nurse.  The reason I wrote New Nightingales was to catch those memories of that wonderful moment in my life, before it was all lost. And then I thought of my parents and sister, all passed away 29 years ago in 1985. There was so much I would want to ask them now, and so many questions I failed to ask them then.  My memory of them is in so many ways based on sketchy half forgotten conversations and passing comments, half ask details, grey memories. So many questions I never asked...

So, the New Nightingales principle applies – I want to record this “Life Map” as so much may be lost. Lost to who, I hear you say! Well I don’t know – but I do know that I will rest easier knowing that this record is there for others. Don’t worry, I do not intend to bore you with the daily minutia of each day – but I hope more to provide a descriptive narrative that is a general reflection on the key moments of this story. This will not be a critical analysis, a treatise; it will be a account, a story – and hopefully a celebration.  And perhaps my immortality, my legacy embodied in my children, in my children’s children – in my children’s children’s children, may one day find an interest in their ancestor born in 1956.

A work in progress