Saturday, 10.45 p.m. Melbourne time. I have just finished watching Parkinson interviewing Paul McCartney (possibly a little behind the time here in Australia by a few weeks, or months), but what struck me very forcibly was the implication of time and ancestors in much re. the Beatles and others, of course, music. Paul's rendition of "Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play," hit me squarely. Here, was a an average lad from Liverpool, writing a song that had universal import, and as you go on listening to the words that follow, you realise that what was written in the 1960s-70s, also has bearing on the 1800s, indeed even the 1700s, etc., and you come to realise that your grand-parents, and your great grandparents, etc., also had these passionate feelings. "Love was such an easy game to play." Oh yes, how it was, even as I look back over fifty years to my teens. Such an easy game to play. And yes, I believe in yesterday! I do, indeed, for it takes me back to a romance that happened when I was merely seven years old. Can you believe that? I certainly do, and the images of those days are still firm in my mind now. I can still see very clearly, me, a lithe boy of seven years walking along grassy lane with a young girl of the same age, blissfully in love with her at even that delicate age, and so on. It ended when she was transferred to another school. Heart break, oh, heart break indeed for such a young soul. I know without any shadow of doubt, that our ancestors had all these same feelings, through their youth, and through their adulthood, up until their very death. I know without any doubt that they shared our own feelings about life, and that they were as devastated as we are by the traumas that happen around us. This is what links us to them. This very humanity. So, it pays to look at them from a different point of view - rather than merely figures in the past - but flesh and blood and with all the angers, jealousies, loves and hates, that we ourselves have. Not much different, when you come to think of it, than Shakespeare's characters! Some of you have the capability, indeed the talent, to do what I have tried to do - put your ancestors into story format (perhaps called fiction) and see where this leads you. For myself, using all the facts given to me by my elder relatives, and that which I have discovered by myself, has so far been a very fruitful journey writing about these folk of mine who certainly do have many coloured characteristics. Try it for yourself, and see them come alive! Look to the facts of what you have so far found and then let your imagination soar to what they probably were in real life! caio Graham