THE DAD FILES
Added 2024-11-19 16:05:04 +0000 UTCHappy Tuesday, you lot. The UFO theme I shared last week... I ended up extending, quite a lot, whenever I had a bit of time over the past few weeks. And I rather like it. Listen above (though I appreciate most of you aren't here for that.
Anyway. Please… allow me to whinge briefly.
In exciting news, Sanja and I can’t shift this bastard cough. We were both awake for a chunk of last night just coughing and coughing and coughing. Other than that, I feel a lot better at least, so – though we haven’t booked our accommodation yet – I’m hopeful we’ll still be filming our next epic later this week. Sanja’s still not feeling brilliant, but she’s a day behind me.
The main worry is that we’re recording an in-person interview, and I don’t want to cough all over the poor UFO man. Oh, and it has been snowing where we’re going, so that’s another potential spanner in the works, but if we can brave it we should have some lovely footage.
GOING THROUGH STUFF - LITERALLY
On Sunday my sisters and I were clearing out our mum’s house, which is likely to be sold imminently. It was a big, horrible, task. We were mainly there to do the job none of us had wanted to face: sorting through the photos. It was tough, emotionally speaking.
We all agreed to finish the job another time. It wasn’t even photos of my dad which tipped me over the edge, but seeing pics of my mum – so different to how she is now, so healthy and happy – that were relatively recent. Yeah, not great. Very upsetting, but it's something many of us will need to do at some point or other.
Because we’re coming close to the house sale completing, we’re all drowning in paperwork. It’s a complicated sale, because we’re doing it on behalf of my mum – we have power of attorney, but also... our own share of the house is kept in a trust, which makes it more complicated still. It has made everything an utter headache, not least because none of us have the brains for paperwork.
SO GLADYS TO HAVE MET YOU
Over the weekend, we did manage to go through an absolute ton of old black and white pics of unknown family members; assorted Gladys-es and Billys. Photos going back right to the 1930s, and even earlier. No idea who they were, and we had to make a collective decision to throw most of them away. I felt guilty every single time, though – like we were sort of diminishing them.
I kept loads of my grandparents though. I think it’s why being a grandad has been so important to me. My relationship with my maternal grandparents, in particular, was so important to me, and because their memory still lives on, so do they in a way. On some weird existential level, being a part of my grandson’s lives – even after I cark it - keeps me around a bit longer, I guess.
One thing that is very apparent is how much of a hoarder my parents were – albeit in very different ways. My mum loved spending money – even with dementia one of her repeated topics of conversation is money (along with - I shit thee not - someone called "Dodo", who last week she was having a baby with, and a man called "Humpty", who my sister is apparently getting married to... she's also obsessed with Tipperary, a place that, as far as I know, she never visited).
Consequently, there was a lot of stuff, much of which were duplicates of things she’d forgotten she’d bought already.
My dad, however, just had reams and reams of paperwork going back decades. Things he could never have possibly needed to keep. Receipts, letters from the bank from the 1950s, statements...
Then there were the files, full of info on the military – ranks and insignia of the British Army, stuff like that – which he’d printed out and kept in clear plastic wallets. I mean, there was SO much of it. Did he ever look at it? Why?! Why did he have this stuff? Why was it in files? Madness!
I kept a few bits and bobs for a future Patreon video – he had loads of old newspapers, some even from the war, which might be worth a look.
Anyway, I’ve also been trying to clear the decks work-wise so I can go away without it hanging over me. So sorry if I’ve been a tad quiet this week. A lot going on! But we’ll be back furnishing you with stuff soon.
Paul
Comments
My parents similarly had tons of items from long-gone decades lying around that we just had to chuck away for the most part, even if a lot of them were clearly emotionally important to them at one point. However, as my dad (born in the mid-1940s) was a pioneer when it came to using computers from the late-1970s onwards, I still regret not even bothering taking a look at the lot of the old mid-2000s generic PCs that he had lying around when we had to clear their apartment, because judging by the files in his last computer, there might have been important stuff stored in them (namely, even more scans of old photos and his own writings) that unfortunately are now lost to time. Granted that most of the remaining data was work related and I largely succeeded in getting a lot of data from his classic Macintosh computers saved in an emulated format, but never did I expect thoughts like "should have at least tried to check if the Zip drive worked!" to keep on haunting me.
Nikumubeki
2024-11-23 07:13:51 +0000 UTCThis is a weird thing to ask but if you find any old photos with guinea pigs in, and you are going to chuck them out anyway, please give me a shout. I collect antique/vintage guinea pig photos and will happily chuck you some cash for them.
Kathy Holloway (Silph)
2024-11-20 16:10:31 +0000 UTC
