Observation is the historian's mode; perception and evocation are the writer's. Whether I read this or whether it's a home grown thought of my own raised in the sunlight of something I did actually read is moot, I just don't know. But it's a thought I've been carrying with me since I turned the last page over Sebastian Barry's WW1 novel, A long, long way, a few hours ago in the dining space at Wholefoods.

The stale has become fresh, fresher than I ever might have imagined; the tired, rejuvenated. I've seen the miserable madness of that war refracted in the most unexpected ways, which I'm struggling to articulate to myself, let alone consider putting into words.

One thing that does is the realisation that war's echoes reverberated across decades and probably never fully left people. Something, oddly picked out in Barry's most recent novel, On Canaan's Side, where elderly Lily Bere, looks back over a long life that began as the sister of Willie Dunne, the protagonist of the novel I've just finished, and takes in the decades spent as an Irish immigrant in America. She talks briefly, yet almost poetically in it's pureness and simplicity about Willie. And I get the sense of deep loss, sadness, that what might have been had it not been for the life shortening cold horrors of the trenches.

Perhaps I was already affected, thinking this way before realising it fully today;  I have after all been steadily reading " A long, long way", for several days now, snatching time to do so whenever I could. I remember looking at the roll call of names on the war memorials in Amble and Warkworth when I was up there earlier this week, thinking of the enormous, irreparable tears made in the fabric of these small Northumberland towns. Neither would have been the same again. Melancholic ghosts, broken hearts, bereft families. Sadness that might dim over time, but would never lose it's visible edge.