It's often said that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. It's not necessarily true, of course, and needs some qualification. I'm more concerned today with its corollary - the idea that those who do remember the past are somehow in a position to avoid repeating it.

This is blatantly nonsense. As any kid will tell you, a parent saying "when I was your age" is a sure-fire sign that what is about to be said is something completely irrelevant. For example

"When I was your age I used to play in the local woods and I got lots of fresh air."
Good for you. I'm not allowed to play outside in case I get knocked down by a driver going too fast while he's on his mobile phone, the woods are now a shopping centre, and if you'd had a playstation when you were young, you'd have played Sonic the Zelda all day too.

Living memory isn't necessarily relevant. How much less relevant are the events of, say, the eighteenth century?

I've written about this before, I'm sure - I must have. Living in the past, particularly if it is an imaginary past, is a trap. It's a nasty and invidious trap because the past can never be questioned - it's not real, it's not even a memory. It's a matter of belief and faith. And like belief in fairies, it's incredibly difficult to question because it's got a whole cult of authenticity behind it. The "you may not believe, but I know mentality which is the adult equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you.

I know it's seductive, and I know it's easy. But if you are always looking to the past and you are determined to recreate past glory - real or imaginary - then how can you possibly see where you are going, apart from backward?

History. We're steeped in it. It's everywhere around us. Like dust and pixies. If you walk down the street, and the street was there yesterday, then you can be fairly confident of where it goes, and where it will go tomorrow. That's learning from History. How good is that?

But mainly, when we talk about History, we're talking about big world events. Kings and Queens, wars and politics, social migration, the evolution of ideas and the propogation of ideologies. And how relevant is that to today's life? Who cares who won at Bannockburn, except for the bekilted octagenarians that man the visitor centre?

There are some obvious chunks of History that are Quite Important. Everything that happens in Europe, for instance, is a consequence of the World Wars of the first half of the 20th Century. A different outcome would have led to a very different political outcome, and probably a very different cultural framework. But it's one thing to live with the consequences of History, and to understand how History impacts on current events, and another thing entirely to take History and use it as an excuse for change.

I'm thinking here of the attitude that says "Our families have been at war since the days of Good King Pablo; I will blow up your daughter on her way home from primary school." That's not a reason, not a justification. It's twisted, pitiable, and it's the mindset of a victim, trapped by a need to compensate for a wrong long past and possibly irrelevant.

Remembering history is different from keeping it alive artificially, from living in it, for letting it trap you. While it's possibly true that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, it doesn't always follow that by learning from history we won't make the same mistakes again. History is just a story, after all, written by historians. It's connected to what happened in the past, but it makes broad canvases out of actions which are driven by small human emotions. It's not right to say that history will teach us nothing, though. The trick is to learn from it without becoming trapped by it, I suspect. Or mayble history is simply bunk.

Alexander Graham Bell, and John Logie Baird. Two Scotsmen whose names will be linked forever with the telephone and the television.

I've written about Bell before. He was born in Scotland, moved to Canada and took Canadian citizenship and was in the US when the telephone was invented. Bell didn't invent the telephone, though. The telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci.

John Logie Baird invented the first television. It was a mechanical device. Marconi invented the electronic system, largely independently. Following trials in the 1930s, Baird's television system was dropped in 1937.

But Scots can nonetheless be proud of these men. Baird may not have invented television well, but he did it first. And Bell may not have invented the telephone, and may not even have considered himself Scottish at the time that he didn't invent it, but he made his name out of marketing it.

Pearl Harbor was, apparently, a day that would live in infamy. But ask a random sample of people in the world when it happened, and while some might guess at it being 1941, relatively few would be able to tell you it was the Seventh of December of that year.

So, not really living in infamy then.

Sixty years from now, we might ask the same question about the Eleventh of September, or September the Eleventh as it is now known. Or "9-11" as it is increasingly being trivialisied to. The chances are that the generation after next might be able to work out what the date was when the Eleventh of September happened.

But will they forget other things about the day? Is there some uncertaintly principle at work here? Will people remembering the date mean that they forget where it happened? Or will it become completely associated with something different?

It's very difficult to make a television programme about something as awful and inconceivable as the events of the 11th of September last year. You can't hope to cover all of the events in an hour long television "special". You certainly can't hope to cover the breadth of acts and emotions in a single post on a web log, when some are so huge, and others are so intimate and personal.

Last night, I saw two programmes about the attacks on the US.

The first was HBO's In Memoriam. Despite the programme's title effectively asserting the death of New York on the 11th of September 2001, this was an incredibly fascinating and moving piece of television. It was built primarily from footage of the events, much of which I hadn't seen before, and supplemented by interviews with Rudolph Giuliani and his staff. Unashamed of its focus on New York, it nonetheless acknowledged the existence of the other planes and events. It focussed on its own story, and did so without giving any context, any speculation as to the source of the attacks, and indulging in only minimal amounts of patriotic self-righteousness. It concentrated on recorded fact, and ended up feeling more like a historic document than anything else.

Later, Granada's "Tonight" program covered the fate of United Airlines flight 93, the fourth plane hijacked, and the one that crashed in a field. This was compulsive viewing, but only because it was incredibly badly made. Based on the conversations that the passengers on the flight had with their loved ones, it built up a picture of what must have happened in the last minutes of the flight. It presented a re-enactment of a side of events that couldn't have been recorded in the way that the collapse of the towers in New York was recorded. However, the production values were so dire that it made the whole sequence of events seem comical, almost a self-parody of a disaster movie from the 1970s.

The underlying idea of the programme was, I think, laudable. It's hard to piece together a coherent picture of events from a dozen second hand conversations. But I wonder if the programme might have been stronger without the mawkish re-enactment, just focussing on the testimonial from the friends and relatives of the deceased.

In a shade under thirty four years, it will be thirty-nine years since the death of Diana, Princess of whatever it was that she was princess of by the end.

I mention this because it's random. Because by then, she will have been dead longer than she was alive. Because people who never met her will have stopped putting flowers outside palaces, near underpasses, by little streams, anywhere that she might once have been. Because then she might get some of the dignity that she was denied.

I'm about to use the phrase 'media circus' again. I can feel it.

I get angry about her, you see. And I get angry about the fact that I get angry. Because during her life, she didn't bother me at all. I was quite happy for her to live her life in the public eye, and me to live mine. Sure, I thought that the press were intrusive and she deserved some peace. But that was about all that I thought about her.

And then she died, and people told me that I had to be sad. I wasn't jumping for joy at the fact that she died, but ultimately her death didn't really impact on my life. And I hated the fact that I was made to feel like I was in the minority because of this. It turns out that the grief may have been blown up out of proportion, in the same sort of media stramash that contributed to her death in the first place.

But it's been five years. Why do "people" still care about it?

And why do I?

I almost let this pass without a mention, for which I am ashamed. Last night was the twelfth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. 48,000 people attended a peaceful rally in Hong Kong, where Beijing was criticised by the alliance for suppressing religious groups, racial minorities and dissidents. Some of the attendees were as young as 13 or 14.

Ignore, for a second, the mainland's views on dissidents and undesirables. Turn aside from the consequences of such a strong anti-Beijing sentiment in Hong Kong, a city with a wonderful schizophrenia about its place in its part of the world. I'm thinking about the children.

I'm thinking about the words of wong Wing-yan, aged 14 who was at one of these commemoration gatherings for the first time. "We're patriots and we love China. So we are here to know more about June 4, and about China."

There's a lot of patriotism here, and a lot of it is new patriotism, uncertain patriotism. But it doesn't have to be blind patriotism. One can love one's country without blindly accepting the decisions of its leaders.