GP is on her autumn sojourn at Poobah Senior Mansions, and performing the unenviable (and inevitable) task of clearing out junk that has accumulated here. Some of this is extremely easy (bog standard kitchenware? Manky old rug??). Others however....
What to do with the mountain of photos that's built up, reminders of holidays and relationships past? Fraught Mummy, what to do with a stack of fantastic photos of running along beaches in Sierra Leone, and refereeing football matches in the pouring rain in Coconut Farm shanty town? MancSoulSister - where to put the unbelievable shots of us at 18, celebrating Val's birthday at a Chinese restaurant in New Mills (funny to think how exotic that was at the time). I've just waded through a mountain of photos of my first trip to Asia - 1997 - didn't quite make it to HK then but have great shots of China, Laos, Cambodia.....and the guy I was there with...
Even more poignantly (for me) - what to do with the billet doux from my relationship with JLow, which surprised me when I found them lurking in a pile of mementos? Evidence that maybe, just maybe, he wasn't always a complete tosser, and even, at some point, didn't hate me quite so much as he clearly did at the end?
And what to do with a sad, sad diary, chronicling depression, the route in but also the route out? It's never going to be for anyone's eyes but mine (you think this blog is badly written....) and given its contents I don't want to immerse myself in it again. Neither do I want to consign it to the bin......
Today's conundrun, then, is how to honour, remember and celebrate the past, without glorifying it, wallowing in it or otherwise feeling beholden to it. And given that, by my reckoning, it's now 11/11 in HK, this seems like an appropriate question on which to finish this post.
Monday, November 10, 2008
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4 comments:
Tricky one, that.
Scan the photos you want to keep and toss the rest.
Keep anything that is small and might help you in the future (as an aide memoir of a hard-learned lesson).
And, errrr, that's it.
Apropos of nothing, it's gone cold here. Brrrrr
God - was I ever really 18!!!??? I actually found some of you and me at 17 on a trip to Cambridge - I'll show you when you come over.
You definitely shouldn't bin the photos one day you will live to regret it (no matter how painful the memories are!) I wouldn't throw the diary either as that is a reminder of what was and how far you have come since.
Sod it - put them all in a box and bury them in the garden - it will make some time team archeologists day sometime in the future....
Don't bin the photos and diary. You can never get them back. I have mine lurking somewhere with a mission to put them into a proper album. I do so like looking at my Mum's (who is so good at doing things like that). Besides, if you throw them out noone will ever believe that we once trained with the Sierra Leonean national sprint team...
Out with the old, in with the new! Send JLow's letters back to him, the swine. Put the rest in a box under lock and key and don't open it for thirty years.
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