It’s raining and I have the day off work.

I am trying to make sense of this lot.

I always knew I “kept all my tapes” but it has been a long time since I have dealt with them and making sense of all of these cassettes is quite something. There is the content for example, what’s actually on the tape, but I have clearly forgotten how my mind worked back in those analogue days and I am struggling to find stuff. Some are meticulously detailed, some are labelled stuff like “meanderings”. Of course, some are just in the wrong box (or worse still are missing).

Then there are the actual objects themselves; the cassettes and their boxes, the manufacturer’s design, the scruffiness from use and storage, the way they were labelled and used, and of course the hard fact that some of the people who gave me these have died.

Now as a middle aged dude both the content and the artifact evoke nostalgia and feeling tones that become quite overwhelming. A cross between a treasure trove and a trip down memory lane where the lane is messier and less inviting than it once was and I am not sure I want to hang around.

There are even reminders of other autumn rainy days off work where it seemed like a good idea to deal with these on another day. Here we are on that day – do I leave these again for another day?

I have no idea of numbers of tapes, but the shelves are three-tapes deep. It’s a good mass-storage system but hopeless for any sort of meaningful archiving!