You will eventually find out I do qualify (age-wise at least) to be called an old fogey. If you check on the meaning, you will find that it is by and large not a complimentary term at all, and it is this perception that I intend to change as we go along .
It is going to be difficult to keep from using "l" too much, but being an old fogey I'm sure you will forgive me. (As you can gather, this old fogey thing also has advantages)
At the outset I'd like to tell you the one most important thing that occupies my thoughts lately: I am one of few people alive who have been given a second chance to live. Four years ago I literally died and later on I shall share with you how this came about, and the profound effect that it has had, and is still having on my day to day existence. It is a rather long story and I shall try to condense It as much as possible without losing the essence. Some of what happened is still coming back from wherever such memories are stored in cases like mine. The bottom line is that humanly speaking I should have been mouldering in a grave and instead I am here trying to relate what happened. What I am going to tell you really occurred. If I were to lie about even one single aspect of it, it would be blasphemous and amount to unspeakably gross ingratitude .
Please bear with me. One of the reasons for relating all of what will hopefully follow in
the coming weeks is an earnest desire to help others to understand and handle things that happen to them better, and to share a Lifetime of experiences and observation of life around me, so that readers may learn from them, and especially highlight the mistakes so that readers can avoid them (if such a thing is at all possible, because over the years I have found that one tends to insist on making the mistakes for oneself just to make sure they are in fact mistakes!) Some wise man once said that we do not really learn from our successes because we hasten to congratulate ourselves on our intelligence and ingenuity, but we can learn a great deal from our mistakes if we can just bring ourselves to admit them.
At this point I would like to explain that I don't think any words of wisdom, sayings, quotes and such that I'll share on these pages will be my own, except where I relate personal experiences. It is going to be impossible to name or credit the real sources of all such material, simply because I don't know, but I give my word that I shall never knowingly plagiarise anyone orknowingly credit one person with someone else's work.
I think that will do for an introduction. I'm quite tired now (note: Remember Bob Hope) and will leave my tales of the cat with a personality problem that I stay with and a number of other interesting issues'for next time.
Fond Regards till next time
YeOldeFogey