Journals of a Time Traveller

Egella, as visualized by Gemini AI

Another two years. Here I am again, starting over. This time things will be different. I've had to learn to let go of my past, of my old life. Living in the past is my poison. Therefore there may be an irony that I now return to my creative writing. I am working on a new manuscript. A follow up to my prior unpublished, unshared effort. Hopefully I have learned lessons. I mean that in more than one way. I have learned acceptance.

The above image represents one character in my story. She is Egella, a frog-witch of the Leva. You can see, she isn't of our age. The setting of the Book is Eastern England, as it was long before it was known as such, more than 6,000 years ago. Egella is just one of the protagonists. But I can't say more than that. Already I reveal too much.

But I'm still here on Earth. 21st century.

Yup, this is myself and the ex, in 1995.  I was in my early thirties, and somehow I became involved in local mainstream politics.  The red tie not so subtly betrays my party affiliation.

I don't really talk much about those days, or how I ended up as a mayor of a small English town for a term.  How and why does someone become political?  What is it in their nature or upbringing that drives them into that direction?  There was no hint of it at school age.  I wasn't really the most politically aware  kid on the block.  Neither did I grow up in poverty, desperate to climb out and to make my mark.  If I think deep, there was a sort of a sympathy with the underdog, and perhaps I was taught a sense of fair play.

If I'm to be honest with you, I pretty much discovered socialism and Marxism very suddenly and energetically in my early twenties, and became a born again revolutionary.  I spent a year or two playing at revolutionary politics, then did what society programmed me to: work more hours, pay tax, get married, raise children get a mortgage, die.  I skipped out on the dying bit when I hit a damaging mid-life crisis.  For the time being any way.

But somewhere in that process, I still craved a bit of political action.  I lived in a little town in Norfolk, there was no revolutionary presence.  So I instead joined the local branch of the Labour Party.  This was still in the days of Clause 4.  Full of zest, I took part in stupid games between cliques, knocked on doors, attended meeting after meeting, every working party of every sub committee.  I took office within the branch and constituency, levered support from my trade union.  Part of that progression involved standing for public office.  I indeed stood for a seat on the local town council.  Against all expectations, I lost to a Tory candidate.  The next day at the branch post mortem, someone looked at the mathematics, and it didn't add up.  There was a miscount.  An excuse for a political campaign, the branch took it to the High Court, then to the Old Bailey.  Ballet boxes were opened, and a gross but basic mistake spotted on the top, on a totting up note.  I was declared rightful councillor, and the poor Tory candidate booted out.

The above photograph was taken early into my second term as a councillor.  I had also won a seat on the District Council.  I was made the mayor of Thetford.  Maybe more on that experience, and my subsequent views on the state of local democracy in England in a later post.