This Is This

When I was about twelve we had a flood which destroyed my family’s keepsakes.

Most of the childhood paintings, recordings, family letters and home movies were lost. What I do have is a mental snapshot of my dad standing midway down the basement stairs with speakers floating at what would have been waist height if he would wade down into it.

The landlord who built the house, who could be politely described as a cunt, designed something completely inappropriate, with a deep cellar under a house he situated in a valley.

After transporting them from country to country around the world, filed and alphabetised in categories which included relatives and destinations, we stored our family memories below ground.

While my ancestors didn’t do much looming, most of the few looms to which I was heir were lost in the Great Flood Of ’83 and all that’s left now is about fourty minutes of silent, moving pictures of a family holiday.

My point, apart from use your lofts, is that we didn’t have that much recorded media anyway compared to these days. I have half a small box full of pictures of my mother, about a dozen shots of my dad’s family, but I’ll never know what they sounded like before I was born, or the way they both stepped when they first stepped out.

Thanks to what was spared from the little that was spared by the flood, my kids have a bit of an idea about how I looked, but not how I sounded. But their kids, my grandchildren, will have hours of baby videos and footage out the wazoo of their, um, wazoos. If they so wish.

Now there are USB sticks, websites where this stuff is uploaded, DVDs, CDs across about a dozen people who can just email this stuff around if anything gets lost.

I wonder how keen they will be to see it. Will they have multimedia libraries on the wall where they can hear and see their parent’s baby videos at the push of the button. That’s just weird, emailing videos of your parents as babies.

But that’s one for them to figure out when I go the way of the flood myself, and it’s too much of a Friday to go there today.

Weekend song blah blah blah you know how we roll. And if you don’t, then I assure you we do. In fact, studies have shown that over the last year we’ve been consistently doing four per cent more rolling month on month.

Have a great one.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 9:26 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.