w/e 2026-08-23

I’m tapping this out on the phone on the train back home at Monday lunchtime, after a weekend in Essex with my sister doing more sorting out of the old family home. We had three four-drawer filing cabinets remaining before we’d complete the big initial phase of “look at every single thing and work out roughly what to do with it, discarding, saving, and finding new homes for some of it along the way.” We got through one cabinet on Saturday afternoon and on Sunday started on the big one: four drawers crammed with a hanging file for nearly every year of Dad’s life, containing letters, leaflets, tickets, receipts, posters, essays, cuttings, photos, articles, mementoes, booklets, membership cards, journals, greetings cards, reports, postcards, payslips, forms, and on and on and on. I think it took us all day to get through one drawer, to the mid-1970s. In a way this is lovely. We’re able to slowly follow Dad’s life through all this saved ephemera, all the things that meant something to…