When I created the former version of this website, six years ago, the telling of my life story had seemed a vaguely fanciful idea. And, now, I am more comfortable with all of that. There is a sort of progression of my viewpoint that has happened during these six years.
The story of being embedded in family feuds will always be a challenging one to make sense of and describe. I have had to make decisions on just how to separate myself from a range of other family members; there is the paradox of my having stuff in common but my being quite separate, too. All the while, of course, seeking out my sets of personal values was loaded with issues that I needed to try to resolve.
The feuds themselves are described by me. It is not particularly wrong to try to patch up feuds, but if that seems impossible then other forms of workaround need to be investigated. Any particular situation will have its very own features. And I would kind of say that — although this journey did have forbidding features to assess and cope with — I did find ways of coping, adapting and prospering. But I have to remain cautious about how optimistic I might sound because seemingly seizing opportunities cannot, in themselves, be a measure of the quality of person that one is. I am, I would say, not entirely materialistic; I think that there are standards that are worth holding onto.
Also, if one is writing about feuds then criticism of others cannot entirely be avoided. One should try to avoid having to do this, and so I have had to apply some caution, as well.
This is a family where there is a fair amount of high intelligence; by no means everyone has played a game of seeking family harmony, either. Although I might now tend towards self-deprecation, I must not lose sight of the probability that the high levels of scheming and deceit which I complain of must be a capability that I have, also. And, therefore, it is my task to endeavour to correct myself and not be too willing to behave in deceitful ways. Whether it is a price I must pay or not, I cannot exactly reckon myself to be fancy-free.
This sort of religious or moral challenge is, I think, a part of the actual legacy of my experiences.
This suite of Slocock family feud books could be continued with. With the former version of this site, I would seemingly forever add notes and comments; the writer’s block would be there. And then, eventually, the next book would get incubated to term and hatched.
