Monday 2 May 2016

The Van


Memory is a funny thing, isn't it?

My brain can store pages of random facts about old TV shows, will often flag up things that I did and said that I now wish I could do differently and, for some reason, retains the middle name of Captain Scott of the Antarctic (Robert Falcon Scott for those of you who are interested - although who knows where I gleaned that from) - but the name of the person you introduced me too five minutes ago: not a chance.

I say this because my mum is currently clearing out her house: going through things that we don't use and downsizing it all and there's still a small wardrobe of stuff that is mine there so every Saturday when I visit her there's a new pile of stuff waiting for me to sort through.  Most of it, to be honest, is junk: old magic tricks that I had as a kid (I used to do magic, and was even a member of the Junior Magic Circle but I lost interest when I realised that the local Senior club was really just an excuse for bitter old men who hated their wives to drink - as I suspect most of these clubs are), old demo tapes from when we thought we could be rich and famous pop stars (the tapes really were awful looking back) and various other dust-gathering paraphernalia.

This week she gave me a folder of prints and negatives to look through, the pages most likely unturned in 30 years.  I actually bought a slide and negative scanner recently that displays the pictures on your computer screen and allows you to save the ones you want.

Most of the pictures there I have no memory of even taking, some negatives had been ruined because they stuck to the paper they were held in (sadly one of my grandfather blowing out candles was amongst these - although I do have a print of this I'm hoping to scan) and there are some that I'm convinced may be my father or brother's pictures - but the one that worried me the most was the one of the van.



It must have been a warm day.  Everyone in the picture is in short sleeves or has their top off and we're all sucking on panda pops (a frozen tube of flavoured ice that probably had millions of e-numbers in it).  It's the school van; made legend by the rust that was all that was holding it together.

The worrying thing is that most of these faces mean nothing to me - and yet I must have known them because I'm one of them (though I'm not going to tell you which)

The lad in the centre in the white shirt is Iain though I can't remember his surname and having looked at it again I think the boy on the far left may be James, but otherwise: nothing.

I knew these people for at least five years of my life.  True; I wasn't always very fond of most of them, but their names and their voices are now gone from my life forever.

It makes me wonder what, if anything, I will remember in twenty years time of the people I know now.






3 comments:

stephen Hayes said...

Old pictures are telling, but they can be frustrating if you can't remember who's in them and what was happening at the time.

pohanginapete said...

If you do want to remember things from long ago (not always a good idea, I suspect), writing about it seems to work well — almost scarily so. As you write, things keep popping up as if they'd been pressed down out of sight by a huge weight of dust that the writing wipes away. Maybe one thought triggers another, and you realise you had these memories all along. The problem isn't losing memories, but retrieving them. (One of my friends reckons he has an encyclopaedic memory — unfortunately, he's lost the index.)

The Bug said...

I've never had a great memory. I worried about it for a while & then figured that if I really do get dementia it won't feel a whole lot different :)