Is it my destiny to be fatalistic?

I was born and raised in the flat wilderness that is East Anglia, and proudly - but inaccurately as it turned out - boasted that my pedigree back to the seventeenth century was pure Norfolk with the occasional dash of Suffolk.


Most of the people around me as a child seemed to have a fatalistic attitude to life. I remember one of my Mum's friends - the sort most of us had as children, who we termed Auntie as a mark of respect but no regard at all for bloodlines - on the way to the doctor's for the results of some test (by the Les Dawson impressions she and Mum were doing, mouthing words I wasn't supposed to understand anyway and hitching up bosoms, I guess it was some gynaecological problem) saying in a resigned tone: 'Oh well, if your number's up, that's it.'


My childish mind, even then, baulked at this notion. Oh no, if the grim reaper was coming after me with his scythe I knew how to run and dodge - you don't catch me that way. But then, I'd never been faced with death, or even its possibility, at that stage.

I have still, thankfully, undergone relatively few bereavements, and those such as one might expect in the normal course of events, but even in my limited experience I have been struck with the different attitudes of people to the prospect of death, and they seem to be heavily influenced by whether the person comes from a rural or urban background.

Rural folk, perhaps beause of a genetic history of living close to the elements, engaged in times gone by in agrarian activities and thus dependent for their very survival on the vagaries of wind and sun, seem to me to take a more fatalistic view of death - and life - than those raised in towns and cities.

My father, on receiving a diagnosis of cancer, remarked without any discernable emotion: 'I'll be gone by Christmas'. True to his word, he died in November. Yet a dear old friend kept a body riddled with cancer, thrombosis and various other ailments going till he was nearly 90, mainly because every time - and this was a regular occurrence - he ended up in hospital 'on his death bed', he remembered a few jobs he had to do before he shuffled off this mortal coil... Yes, a Londoner.

Understanding your background influences is the first step to choosing to control them, and either through this or by replacing my rural family fatalism with that of my London-born husband I don't know - but I believe that any experience can be shaped by my brain so that I can take approach it positively.

But this does not stop me enjoying Greek tragedy - or the fatalistic novels of the very rural Thomas Hardy!