I had reason recently to go through my wooden box of
memories in search of photos to digitise for a friend. Most people have a small
box of keepsakes that sits romantically on the top of a chest of drawers, and
contains carefully curated aspects of past lives that stir memories and promote
wistful conversations.
I have a three foot long IKEA panelled box that I imagine
is supposed to contain DIY equipment. It is rammed to the top with nearly
twenty handwritten diaries, huge numbers of ticket stubs, old collections of
birthday cards and bus tickets. It used to be worse. My wife has exerted a
gentle influence over twenty years and I have now been able to face up to the
fact that I do not need every train ticket from every journey I made to see her
when we were dating. Instead I was allowed to keep one. Similarly, my fine
collection of early 1990s phone cards have been binned. I am suspicious about
this one but I am unwilling to look on eBay to see if I have thrown away a
fortune. I suspect not.
What remains are a large number of carefully curated
tickets from major rugby internationals, and cherished film tickets. There are
also a lot of mass cards for deceased older relatives.
What is interesting for me as I race towards fifty is
that I was quite bad in deciding what would be important and should be kept. I
should be able to put my hand straight on photos, which I always assumed I
would take great care of, but seem to have been put somewhere else and are now
lost. By contrast, if you want the railway timetable for the line to Norwich
for 1997, I can tell you departures from Shenfield and Colchester without a
problem. I kept swimming pool entry vouchers, which are stuffed in the same bag
as my certificate confirming that I am godfather to my niece. WHY did I keep
such ephemeral items alongside the important stuff?
I have realised is that what could not be foreseen was
how easy it was going to be to look things up to remember dates and events. I
thought, for example, that I would always need to remember the date of the
Lightning Seeds gig at UEA and that if I lost the slip of paper that was the
receipt (not even the ticket) the information would be lost forever. The
information can now be accessed from my phone whilst sitting on the toilet.
[It was 18th January 1997].
To everyone born in the 21st Century such
behaviour must seem so very eccentric. We are living in an age in which music
in a solid state is pretty much over. Why keep a CD when you can shout at a
machine and it will play you exactly what you want to hear, and usually for
free? Purists (and by purists, I mean old people) argued for a long time that
to hold an LP in your hands is an important part of the experience. With the
exception of the LP backlash fuelled by worried fiftysomething men, music is
now an ephemeral experience.
For books, it is a more complicated issue. I have a
winning line in this debate. Whenever a devotee of an e-book tells me that I
can more or less send my large library of paperbacks to recycling, I pause,
adjust my corduroys, and put down my pipe. I pick (seemingly at random – that’s
part of the charade) a book from the shelf and open it. Inside is a dedication
from my best friend, now passed away. How can I throw that out?
The fact remains, however, that I was really bad at
trying to predict what would be important to keep and what would end up being no
more than bits of paper. An example of my short-sightedness was how I reacted
to the birth of the internet. In about 1995 it dawned on me that every game
that Liverpool FC had played up to that point had been helpfully listed on a
very early website. I decided to print the whole lot and keep it on paper. Why
did I do that? I think I thought that the information might be withdrawn,
somehow deleted by an over-zealous keeper of facts. The opposite is true.
Today, and for many years, I have spent countless hours immersed in a beautiful
website created by enthusiastic Icelandic fans:
and I am sure that similar sites exist for every other
team with fans as dedicated.
What should be my reaction to this? Any normal person
would, I suppose, somewhat reluctantly pass eight books of Liverpool history
over to a charity shop. Mine sit proudly on a bookshelf, untouched for nearly
twenty years. My justification: you can’t throw anything about your football
club away! That would be sacrilegious!
As the decade comes to a close, I suppose a New Year resolution
for me has to be to throw away even more of my cherished collection of Things. I
hope I am better now at predicting what is going to be valuable in twenty years
and what is not. Only time will tell.
List 1: Things I will be throwing away in 2020
A complete collection of mid-1990s Kronenbourg bottle
tops
100+ Southend Transport bus tickets, circa 1986-88 (all
for the Number 7 route)
Beer mats from the Jerma Palace Hotel, Marsascala, Malta
(it closed in 2001)
Training notes for the 1994 English teaching assistant
programme in Normandy
Instructions for the toaster from my parents’ house that
they threw away in 1989
List 2: Things I will not be throwing away in 2020
Everything else
If you would like anything from List 1, you can contact
me at the usual address.
