Recently, ‘Unexamined Lives’ researched the family history of the Borrowash Dyches, working from William Dyche’s handwritten memoir.  His  vibrant account  (overlapping  the 19^th and 20^th centuries) is enhanced  by some  intricate watercolour paintings of the village and his childhood home,  but the ‘Dyche file,’  held by  the Derbyshire Records Office, also contains over 100 black and white photographs of other people.

Amanda Solloway is a longstanding resident of Borrowash and can often be seen out and about in the village alongside her husband Rob and their dogs. She is a Parish Councillor, but in May 2015, the Solloway family experienced something of a collective tsunami when Amanda narrowly defeated sitting Labour MP, Chris Williamson, to become the Conservative MP for Derby North. The Labour MP had been widely expected to win; it was the shock result of the night in Derbyshire and nobody was more surprised than the new MP who was anything and everything but the stereotype of a female Tory politician. She had no Politics Philosophy and Economics  degree from Oxford (or even a Geography degree from that university like her present boss,Theresa May) had never worked as a Special Advisor to a Cabinet Minister, at the Bank of England or even as a diary assistant or lowly caseworker to a Backbench MP.

‘I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.’(Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto  Eco).

‘What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,’ (‘Romeo and Juliet).

I have never agreed with Juliet. If a rose, despite its delicate scent were to be re-styled as a corpse flower (an Indonesian plant that smells as detestable as it looks) its dignity would be tarnished. Similarly a surname can enhance or blight its owner as I know only too well; particularly during the period of childhood and adolescence.

‘The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the boundary?’ (Pablo Casals).

When ‘Unexamined Lives’ started to take shape in 2011, it was sometimes difficult for interviewees to understand what it was all about. Should they talk about buildings or people? Did those people have to be Borrowash residents, past or present? What about people who were linked to the village in another way? Now, five years and 34 written Lives later, the word that most nearly sums up the essence of the project is ‘connection.’ Anthony Heron, who with Paul Hart has conducted most of the interviews, describes the concept in this way:

Ian Anderson, a long-term resident of Borrowash, is in many ways, typical of the famous baby boomer generation born between 1946 -1964 whose members include Bill Clinton, David Bowie and Tony Blair. Baby Boomers were characterised by their capacity to work  and play hard whilst making money and enjoying  it, in contrast to their parents who had endured wartime austerity and led  lifestyles in the shadow of rationing and  ‘making ends meet.’

‘We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.’ T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’

Many people who contribute to ‘Unexamined Lives’ do so because they want to re-visit past relationships and family experiences in order to make sense of them. For Ruth Simpson, however (who was born in Carlisle but moved to Borrowash with her family as a small child) it is the village itself that matters.

2014 was a landmark year in the life of the nation because it marked the centenary of the outbreak of World War One. For June Martin, long-standing resident of the Priorway estate in Borrowash it bore an added personal significance because on 3^rd of June, 2014, she reached the age of 80. Her children, Jeff, Janet and Nicola orchestrated the celebrations, beginning with afternoon tea at Hollies Farm and culminating in a memorable Sunday lunch in the Gun Room at Breadsall Priory restaurant: