The Aymara people of the Andes gesture in front of them when talking about the past, and behind when talking about the future. This might seem odd, but there is logic to it: although we think of the future as in front of us, it is unknown – we cannot see it. And although we regard the past as behind us, we can see it, and know it. Or we think we know it, through our memories. But memories can be unreliable.
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I might have told you about Beery. He taught English and Games, sort of, at Watford Grammar. Some time in the 1990s my mother showed me his obituary in the Watford Observer. “Do you remember him fondly?” she asked. My reply was uncharitable. “There were a lot of good teachers at Watford Grammar, but he wasn’t one of them.” I went on to recount, with some lingering bitterness, how he had set us a task in English of writing a story set on a North Sea oil rig. We were required to fill at least a page of our exercise books: my story ran to two and a half pages, and I poured my creative little soul into it. It came back with two spelling corrections and a tiny red tick at the end. That was all the feedback he gave. The memory was crystal clear.
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My blog contains many recollections, and they are often backed up with photos of supporting documentation from the Edwards Archives. Some readers have imagined my house as a jumble of dusty and ancient documents. But we have no more clutter than an average house.
Consider my school calendars. These bijoux pocket books are 82mm x 119mm. I thought I had kept every one; seven years, three terms each makes 21. Now I see I have only 20: to my horror Spring Term, 1971 is missing. How did that happen?
Anyway, when stacked they fill 44mm of shelf length, so in total they occupy 429.352 – let’s call it 430 cubic centimetres of my house. Less than a pint.
They are a cornucopia of personal history. They tell me that I scored 15 of the 42 all out the 3rd XI amassed against Tiffins School on 15th June 1974. They tell me, term by term, which teachers worked at the school. They tell me where, when and with which teachers I had my lessons. They tell me that in our 15-run defeat against Haberdashers’ Aske’s School Ambridge scored 39, Perrot 27, Topping 16, and Dare 12. I weighed in with 8. If only I’d managed 24 that day.
Consider, in comparison, something else taking up space in the house, say Slam by Nick Hornby. It’s a moderately entertaining book, but I don’t imagine I will read it again. We were brought up to treat books with reverence, so there it sits. Its dimensions are 129mm x 197mm x 20mm, so it’s occupying 508.26 cubic centimetres. Why, that’s over 18% more than my school calendars. And which, tell me, has more to say about my life?
I have a continuous set of diaries going back to 1975. I never entrusted them with my innermost thoughts, which is probably a good thing, for there they sit on the shelf. They can tell me who I knew in 1978, which shows we saw in 1989, which year we went to Lanzarote. They even told me what that bloody film was.
I have every school report from 1963 to 1974. I have a schedule listing the A-level and S-Level results of my entire 6th-form cohort: that has enabled me to intimidate former schoolmates with my knowledge of their shortcomings for half a century. None of that GDPR nonsense in 1974. I have every CV I’ve ever written: they don’t take much space as I didn’t change my employment again after 1991, and CVs were flimsy things back then. The estate agent’s particulars for every house we’ve owned. All our old address books. My dealing books from work…
In fact none of this stuff takes up much space, except perhaps my ever growing collection of A4 scrapbook folders. Well yes, I might have a problem there.
But even they take up less shelf space than our unplayed DVDs and VHSs.
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So what about Beery? I also kept many of my school exercise books, and when I was writing a piece about my old school I sought out my second year English exercise book, which gave me the opportunity to test my memory of fifty-four years earlier against the hard evidence. There, dated 28th February 1969, was Explosion on the Rig. In fact it was five pages long, not two and a half. There were three spelling corrections, not two.
The red tick was not so tiny. And there was more feedback. In the same red ink, he had written “Well done!”. Beery, I owe you an apology. R.I.P. sir.
Without my hoarding, um, archiving habit I would have held that unfounded grudge against Beery until my last breath. Memories are unreliable, and that is why I keep every scrap of my personal history documented. Anything less would be unfair to my biographer.
There are currently no plans to publish “Explosion on the Rig”.
Ramblings 
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