Entry for December 1, 2006

I caught myself today getting stressed out and angry over some difficult and frustrating files, before I internally reprimanded myself.
The reason for self-reproach came from a story I heard about my papa (my dad's dad). My dad told me it the other day, and I'd never heard it before. I'd been talking to my dad about a programme that's been on the BBC about people tracing their ancestors - it's been really interesting. The really eye-opening thing is how you only have to go back a generation or two to see how easy life has become for us.
It's trite I know, but we really do take for granted the central heating, the accicdent and emegency unit and Saturday Nights with Ant and Dec. A few short lifetimes ago, and but for an accident of time and place, I'd have been packed off to war (not that I'd ever have got there come to think of it - my appendix would have burst at the age of 14 an that would have been an end of me).
Anyway, it occurred to me during this programme, how much of an accident it is that I'm here at all . Think about it, most of the people who are around today are the descendants of people who somehow scraped through the two world wars. I mean how unlikely is that? How curious.
So I asked my dad what my papa had done in the war. I knew he hadn't been in the army because he was a foreman in the bolt works - engineering was a protected industry - he couldn't go to war and be killed even though he tried to join up four time> think of that - four attempts to go to war. I'd have been hiding in the coal bunker wearing a ladies' dress and faking asthma.
But he was in the fire service too. That's the bit I didn't know. He fought fires in the Clydebank Blitz. Bombs dropping around him, he had to put out fires and save peoples lives. Get this - he found his superviser hiding under the fire truck it was so terrifying.
I thought of that, and I stopped moaning about the files.