This is the story of how I discovered Gilbert White. Because of my work, we moved from Cambridgeshire to Gosport. Elayne’s family live in South London. The easiest route to visit them is to travel north on the A3. Just to the north of Petersfield is the only roundabout on the A3 outside the M25.
The first exit off the Roundabout is signposted “Gilbert White’s House”. For I don’t know how many years from 2014 (when we moved) as we went around the roundabout, I would ask, ” Who is Gilbert White? Why is his house sign posted”? And then I googled him. I then knew about Gilbert, and I then knew about his book.
It took us another couple of years to visit The Wakes. In the meantime, I was determined that I was only going to buy his book when we visited his house. That’s when my journey with Gilbert really began.
I started writing Letters to Steve in early February. I had been poorly in January, my first month in retirement. I had not enjoyed January, but February was getting better, and I wanted a mission, a task. I was getting them through u3a as well, but this was different, somehow it felt more personal, mainly I think because of Steve, my best friend who had died 23 years earlier. It seemed a bit strange writing to him, but I felt there was no one else who would have appreciated it.
What triggered tonights post is Gilbert’s letter 21 (XXI), My assistant and I had only just concluded a fairly detailed discussion about potential future aspects of the letters. I’m only on Letter 21, and they are evolving from what had been a direct response to Gilbert White’s letter into something else.
What got both my assistant and I was the fact that letter 21, written in 1769, referred to something that was incredibly close to what we had been discussing as a potential development. Talk about synchronicity.
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