You had to be there

What triggers old memories? Most of us have photo albums, digital or otherwise, that we pull out from time to time to help us to remember long-past places, people, and occasions. As valuable as those mementos are, I'm always bothered by my feeling of remoteness from the images. In the best cases, the pictures will trigger a set of associations that will help me to conjure the historical context of what I'm seeing, but even then it's an intellectual response. I don't feel very much. It's as if I'm looking at someone else's experiences rather than my own and, I suppose in a way that's exactly what I'm doing. I've got a small fistful of pictures from this trip to England and the insides of the houses that I lived in when I was there, and I've looked through them a few times. They're singularly unimpressive. In fact, when I was in the houses, strange as it seems after so much anticipation and excitement, I didn't really even want to take pictures, but I knew I'd regret it if I didn't. Thing is, it wasn't the images, the colours and the textures that triggered the felt experience of the houses so much as the activities they afforded. *Doing* things brought back much more emotional recollections than *seeing* things.This was driven home for me while walking around in Walthamstow, on a shopping street that I knew I had frequented with my mother many decades ago. As I walked up to a tall, wrought iron fence surrounding a churchyard, I had the irresistible urge to run along the grass beside the fence, flapping my fingers into the rails of the fence as I went. So that's what I did. I have no idea why that fence called to me in such a way, but I assume it's because when I was a little boy, I'd done the same thing. For a few seconds, all the years fell away and I was about seven years old again. No photograph could have triggered that response, I don't think. You had to be there, as they say.