The Random Thoughts of Henry Holloway
The Portadown Times has been going through a kind of ‘flit’, you will know the upheaval it means. We are in the middle of one now. The familiar questions are ‘Did you see the bread-knife? ‘Who took the floor brush?’
When eventually we arrive at our new destination everything will be in a jumble. During the first week or two we’ll be taking wrong turnings and looking into the wrong cupboards. We’ll be thinking of the old house which was home and we’ll be trying to make the same home in a new house. We’ll be making new friends.
On one of our many changes we arrived at our new home to find the painters and paperhangers in possession of it. Our youngest, and only lassie was just a toddler. And the house was a child’s paradise. She wandered into the dining-room which was just being papered and there was nobody there. There on the floor was a pot of paint and a brush, just asking to be used. She promptly used it to good effect on the brand new wallpaper. It was just after the war and paper was hard to get. The poor men had to strip about three lengths of paper off the wall and do it all over again. We couldn’t help wondering what the people would think. If the wee lassie could do so much damage on her first day, inside the first half hour, I’m sure they dreaded to think what the whole family might do in five years.
The printing office of this paper looked just as it always does when I looked in the other day. The staff in the outer office showed no signs of wear and tear. To my unpractised eye the works looked tidy enough. But there had been something of a great overhaul and a great many headaches before this paper reached you today in its new guise.
Well this paper has undergone great changes, though it still lives in the same house and we may well hope it will, like ourselves, make many new friends without losing the old. Some will mourn the passing of the old. Maybe a bit like the old boy who complained during the war when they were making newspapers smaller! He said, ‘Isn’t a man going to get any privacy at his breakfast nowadays?' Perhaps that one’s too subtle for you!
There was a man once who had just moved into a small town in Pennsylvania, and fell into conversation with an old Quaker who was in the habit of sitting on a bench in the quaint square in the centre of the little township. ‘What kind of people live here?’ asked the newcomer. ‘What manner of people dids’t thee live among before?’ returned the Quaker. ‘Oh, they were mean, narrow, suspicious and very unfair,’ answered the man. ‘Then,’ said the Quaker, ‘I am sorry but thee will find the same manner of people here.’ Not long after, another newcomer joined him on the bench and asked him the same question, and, like his predecessor was asked, ‘What manner of people did’st thee live among before?’ A warm smile spread over the newcomer’s face. ‘Friend’ he answered. ‘They were the best folk in the world. They were always friendly, kind and lovable and I hated to leave them.’ The old Quaker beamed, ‘Welcome neighbour,’ he said, ‘Be of good cheer, for thee will find the same fine people here.’
The good you see in others is just a reflection of your own. On that level I know that the newcomer, ‘The Portadown Times’ will find many new friends.
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