This week mostly I have been shredding

This week mostly I have been shredding: sacks and sacks of paperwork and other memorabilia going back years and all of it my own!

If you have been following events so far you will know that I was an administrator/ translator of other people’s paperwork for years, which, even if I say so myself, was always carefully kept and catalogued and returned or weeded out as and when required – my own documents – not so much.

On the basis that I would get around to it at “some point”, my personal filing system consisted of shoving everything into huge plastic boxes (the giant kind that are intended for bedding) and never throwing anything away of course- this is Spain after all!

Well now I have the time and “some point” has arrived and what a voyage of discovery it has turned out to be.

Box one was the most recent, old tax returns, vida laborals, old passports – wow did I really travel around with THAT photo for ten years?

By box two we are further down the strata of the archaeological dig of my life: a poem I wrote in 1997 for an animal charity fundraiser, birthday and Christmas cards, newspaper cuttings of the boys as teenagers playing football, a couple of tiny pension plans I had forgotten all about and wage slips from over 30 years ago.

Then comes box three and we have reached the mother load: More poetry (it must have been a phase) birth, marriage and divorce certificates (I could have saved myself a fortune applying for duplicates if only “some point” had come sooner), a bible my parents gave me as a child, my father’s war medals and many, many photographs going back for years; all of course pre digital.

Box three had the least thrown away from it – obviously I had already selected the contents as “keepers” when I made the move to Tenerife in the early nineties. But it was box three that took the longest to sift through- stopping to re-read or study every item.

It was while exclaiming for the umpteenth time “ohhh, do you remember….” that it occurred to me that todays Millennials are unlikely to know the pleasure of finding, as a sixty-six-year-old woman , a hand written letter from her seven-year-old self to her parents, written whilst in hospital having her tonsils out.

My grandchildren have had their lives photographed from birth, but it’s all out there in the ether, a series of electronic ones and zeros, well actually probably not even that nowadays with the rise of organic mediums such as DNA as alternatives to silicon.

Deoxyribonucleaic acid, DNA, can store vast amounts of information encoded as sequences of it’s molecules, known as nucleotides, the “programming” is really biochemistry.

DNA computation has enormous future potential, we’re not there yet, but one day will we see advertisements to convert silicon data to organic data, so that a lifetime’s photographs and stories are not lost?.

Those of us of the generation that had the dilemma of choosing between Betamax and VHS can appreciate that getting stuck on the wrong side of technological advancements can be a pain. Betamax became obsolete, having lost the videotape format war to VHS which in turn lost to DVD, which today is gradually being driven out by streaming platforms.

You get the idea, but with each leap forward the recording process becomes less physical and more ephemeral and I worry that in the future fewer people will enjoy the hands-on experience of the written or printed word or photograph. Even today videos that are uploaded as “my stories” to Facebook or Instagram self-destruct after a short amount of time.

So I’ll stick to the boxes, and when I’m asked:

“Save paper, consider the environment, do you really need to print this email?”

Well yes sometimes I really do need to, after all consider what would have happened if the Rosetta Stone, the artefact which helped scholars crack the code of the ancient Egyptian writing system of hieroglyphics, had also required a missing, now obsolete, “Stone reader” from 196 B.C?