49 of 50

There’s just one more of the original FiftyfromFifty to come after this one and for me this has been a bit of a nostalgia trip. I’ve tried to keep most of the posts positive and avoid any sense of weltschmerz, there are of course exceptions that prove the rule in the archive of posts. It’s also worth noting that all the posts are more memoir rather than diary, by which I mean they are my recollections of the time and not something that I have taken from a verbatim first hand account written at the time.

I’m pretty sure that my memory is reasonably reliable – at the moment at least. But having said that I had a long list of possible things to write about and some I definitely remember better than others and I’ve tended to stick to the ones that I am more certain of. For example I have memories of flying kites on the Downs and hunting for tadpoles in local streams. I know these things happened, I’m sure of them and even to a certain extent who else was there but I’m not sure enough to write coherently about the adventures.

They are happy memories and I feel blessed to be able to talk about such things where many people don’t have the same feelings about their time growing up.

I’ve also spent a lot of time going through old photographs this year, digitising some of them as I went. Some of them come from a time when I was too young to remember what was going on or why the photograph had been taken. Some I’ve been able to make a guess at though.

For example the image above definitely shows my Dad (in the apron) and my Uncle. They’re in my Grandad’s butchers shop. Beyond that my guess that the baby is either me or more likely my cousin and this is a christening or a christening tea afterwards. I probably wasn’t born when this was taken or even if the baby is me too young to remember it, but it does bring back happy memories of three significant people from my childhood and most of my adult life.

While I’m happy to share these pictures and my surmises about what is happening I can’t do so with any large degree of confidence and make a post about them, so I tend to err away from them. So although I have a nice photo I don’t necessarily have the memory to go with it or similarly I’ll have good memories and no photos.

Memory is a fickle thing.

Thanks for reading.