I’ve been having a cleanup at home, throwing out random boxes, consigning ancient dead hardware to the spare-parts heap, tidying up personal documentation.
I now have a box-file full of personal stuff, stuff that really means something to me. I suppose in a way, the collection really is ‘DTL inna box’. I didn’t set out with the plan of creating this, just a plan to clear up.
Dipping randomly into the box we find:
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Photos from my first holiday alone
A copy of my degree transcript
An old watch
My GCSE & A-level exam timetables and results
A draft copy of the only love letter I’ve ever sent
More photos
A ciphered list of accounts and passwords – freshly updated today.
Random notes on scraps of paper, things that were at the time too important to me to trust to memory.
I suppose that since I’ve been looking into the family history and researching the family tree, I’ve become aware that almost none of the 120-odd people we’ve found out about has left anything much behind them so that we can really know them. There are no records of their thoughts, their loves, their motives for anything.
This annoys me, I’m an information junkie, to discover even the most mundane of journals or diaries from any of those ancestors would be a thrill. To in someway get to know them beyond the string of numbers we have signifying their birth, marriage and death dates.
Now ‘DTL inna box’ is for my own use. A collection of memories and events; everything in one place for the first time. There is no narrative to the collection, no order, but I do wonder if possibly someone, decades from now, will look through the (hopefully) greatly expanded collection and get some inkling of who I was.
