I remember sitting in my mums house one day on the sofa after lunch, everyone feeling full and watching some non-descript program on the television.
My mother was nervously sitting in her chair obviously trying to make a decision to do something, eventually she decided on it and got up from her chair and left the room closing the door softly and going upstairs.
When she returned she brought with her one of those little dictaphone transcribing tape recorders you might have seen in a previous life in a meeting or while at collage in AV maybe.
Instead of making a big deal to the room she seemed to go through a series of steps to check the volume, align it on the side and play it at low volume close to her.
Of course being me I had to ask what that was and there was a look of both surprise that I was interest but also like I’d just discovered one of her guilty pleasures that she normally did alone.
Then her face changed again, whilst turning down the volume on the television she turned up the volume on the tape unit. I could barely make out what was being said but after a few moments I realised it was my moms mother, my grandma.
In that moment, regardless of what was actually being said or discussed I could see how much comfort and solace this recording gave my mother, like she needed to add the voice of her mother to the room to add some background ambience.
To keep her reminded or in remembrance. .. in that moment I realised the power of media to reactivate memories, often life memories of better times and whilst that recording was done when my grandma was in a care home it still brought back memories of christmas time, ice cream in the garden and sitting with my grandad in his green house.
Our parents and grandparents are literally cloud instances of information, they are closely related to us in dna, their perceptions, their storage, the things they have witnessed and seen and made decisions and conclusions about how they saw situations in life are all stored away, ready to be remembered and called on, activated even.
I was very close to my grandma, even when I got locked up for like four hours for stealing a pole in wilkos for our “ninja matches” when I was 14 (because sticks were shit) and she asked me if the pole had ‘fallen’ into my trousers, not wanting to validate what I did then my grandma always had wise, sage like advice which I took very seriously.
Coronavirus is seeing us globally lose people, a lot in the later stages of life to this horrible virus, with them, stories and tales, never to see the light of day, as of writing 30,000 people we will never know about or meet, we will never know their unique movie script of their life here on the planet (unless of course they wrote books or kept journals etc)
I think it’s a prime time for us to be recording their stories, capturing those tales, maybe over lunch or while they sit in the sunshine, maybe it’s time to capture those tales for another time, you don’t know when it’s going to be relevant to your own life and it might bring calm and familiarity to your day to day, we have so much to learn from what went before and how the generations of your family transitioned through this world before you.
__humble x
