Canon Ann Easter, Chief Executive of a Charity and Chaplain to the Queen.

I’m really sad that the BBC tv series ‘Call The Midwife’ has finished – they say there’ll be another series. I do hope so because I so enjoyed it. I loved the believable characters and the interesting stories – and I cried every time another baby was born! Aaah!
But I read that some people thought the series was a success because it took us back to a kinder and safer time. Really? In Poplar? I’m not sure I agree with that!
I think sometimes nostalgia casts a rosy glow that obscures our view of the past when we’re hankering after its imagined simplicity.
Listen to this quote from a newspaper - ”The gangs who infest the neighbourhood have been getting worse and worse, until now it is no exaggeration to say that the more respectable people of the community go in fear of their lives....”
When do you reckon that was written? It’s not last year, it’s from 1898, you know, the sweet and gentle Victorian era in Lambeth..
Now I love to reminisce with the best of them. Sometimes the children ask me to get out the old family photos and we laugh at all the old fashions and when we remember the uncle who went to the wrong funeral and the cousin who got locked in a toilet and had to climb out through the skylight. But there are also pictures of the ruins my father’s family home on the Isle of Dogs after it was destroyed by bombing and one or two photos of the grandfather I never knew because he died of TB, incurable in those days.
But, as they say, ’Yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery, today’s the present, God’s gift to us’ and I think that it’s good to remember the past but then to use those memories to inform and improve today; let’s do more of what made us feel safe – and let’s, please, stop doing the stupid things that made us unhappy.