I have just read The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards.  It's described as being about redemption (at least at the end) but I'm not entirely sure.  More, it seems to me, to be about the outworking of a single decision - a choice made in haste and with honest, if foolhardy, intent, the consequences of which were worked out over a lifetime.  It is an unhappy tale, at least for the character we meet first and his close family, but one that provokes some thought.  I also read A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon, a very different, and overall humourous tale, and included a fleeting mention of one Miss Cottingham, class teacher who filled me with terror at the grand old age of 9!  Yet here, too were hints of the interconnections of lives, the consequences of secrets and half-truths.  I suspect I must be getting too intense in my old age when my summer reading gets the old grey matter going - or is it just middle aged angst?!

When I was around 12, an English lesson introduced me to Roberts Frost's poem The Road Not Taken, which I now know inspired M Scott Peck's spirituality writing (which I have never read).  It was one of those poems that lodged deep inside and surfaces ever now and then.  Choices - consequences and the "impossibility of going back to repeat the experiment" as my old boss used to say.

This week the A level results came out, and I was being a 'responsible adult' with a friend of mine at her son's results day party.  Watching these young adults celebrate, observing the different characters and listening to the hopes and dreams mingled with the first stirrings of nostalgia (they chose to have a primary school sports day as their theme!) the poem came back to me along with memories of the last 26 years since my own (and, I thought at the time, dreadful) A level results arrived.

I guess I've been pretty fortunate - I have very few regrets about the choices I've made along the way, and I'd like to think that I've learned from the mistakes I've made.  Watching these youngsters, and knowing some of what lies ahead of them - joy and sorrow - is a strange experience.  The girl with five grade A's and no confidence, the shy boy whose grades meant he didn't get in to his first choice, the couple who've chosen to go to the same university because they can't stand the thought of separation...  what will their futures hold?  How will the party be recalled in 26 years time when they are middle aged (and I am old!)?  Who will still keep in touch with whom?  What dreams will lie shattered on the floor?  Will any of them be doing this navel gazing?

The Memory Keeper's Daughter centred on a very big decision made in haste and its consequences over a life time.  Not every choice is as dramatic or its consequences so far-reaching but the book did make me think afresh about the decisions I make and the ripple effects they have  - whether it's the brand of coffee I buy, the path I choose on an afternoon stroll, the books I read or the sermons I preach.  I suspect that at the end of time when the review takes place, the sum of the small, seemingly inconsequential, decisions will be as great if not greater than the one or two mammoth ones I wrestled with.

All very deep as a response to a bit of summer reading - maybe next time I'll read some real rubbish!