I have an odd superpower which sometimes makes people uncomfortable. I can be, say, in the pub with friends and talk about an old acquaintance, and mention some party we went to together a decade ago. Said friends may wonder what said acquaintance looked like, or enquire about the fabulous outfit I remember having worn on the night.
In under a minute, I will be able to source picture evidence of the event, and show it to them. It’s a cheap parlour trick, and one that often makes me look like a bit of a stalker, or someone whose searching skills are too efficient for their own good. As it happens, it isn’t a talent at all. Instead, it’s the result of three or four days of arduous work, which began when, allegedly, a pangolin and a bat loved each other very much, somewhere near Wuhan.
I went quite mad during the lockdowns because I was living alone, and I had relatively little to do. Finding ways to entertain myself became a daily, madness-inducing chore. The one thing I remain proud of to this day was my decision to scour the internet and download every picture of friends, family and myself I could find.
I travelled through time over the course of around half a week. There was Twitter and Instagram, of course, but before that there were Facebook and blogs, both mine and others’. I went through them all, methodically, and managed to create a library of memories, some of which I remembered and others I’d entirely forgotten.
The next part was the most painful one. Later that week, I set out to create a series of keywords for each picture, including the location, the year and the people featured. It was mind-numbingly boring, and more labour-intensive than I could have imagined.
Still, I’m incredibly happy I did it. Every year, I now get to add the latest tranche to my folder, which is a considerably less painful endeavour. Whenever I want to remind myself of a person, an event or an era, I know that it will just be a few clicks away. Crucially, it ended up only being the beginning.
Though I’d been lazily, vaguely keeping a list of books I’d read on my laptop, the pandemic made me decide to properly log everything on a Google doc. Said document is now sorted by year and includes nearly 150 titles. When, sometimes, friends complain about not knowing what to read next, I get to gleefully ask them for their preferences, get the list out, then make a thoughtful list of recommendations. I’m happy; they’re happy; everyone wins.
Because I never quite know where to stop, I felt that the next logical step would be to start keeping track of all the movies I watched in the cinema. Thanks to the magic of ticket receipts, I recently managed to create a list that goes back to 2022. In the process, I reminded myself of some hidden gems, lauded movies I’d unexpectedly hated, and comedies which brightened up dour periods of my life. Again, it felt like travelling through time.
Now, at the end of 2024, I get to look back on all those lists and think of the year that was. There were some highs and Christ, there were some lows, but most of it was spent in little pockets of calm. Poor Things was a beautiful and thought-provoking movie, and American Fiction made me laugh out loud.
I wept while reading Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson, and suspect that I’ll be haunted by Sarah Perry’s Melmoth for a very long time. None of those moments were life-changing, which is why it can be so easy to forget about them, but they were the hours which made life more bearable, when all I needed was solace.
Because I’ve come to cherish those lists so dearly, my mission this week will be to buy a hard drive, and make sure that they aren’t going anywhere. People have sometimes asked me why I went through all that trouble with those pictures, and refuse to engage with dedicated websites like Letterboxd or GoodReads. The reason is simple, and it is that I no longer trust the internet.
Sites and platforms come and go and, as we have increasingly been finding out, CEOs will have no qualms about wiping acres of data, just because they have decided they no longer care. What is mere storage space to them represents chunks of our lives that would otherwise go unremembered.
It is easy to think of the internet as a scrapbook, where everything can be recorded and nothing ever goes away, but it simply is not the case. Our memories are too precious to be put in the hands of those who would happily sell them for a penny. Not everything needs to be public either; what I choose to read or watch is my business, and my business alone.
My sole audience, as far as I’m concerned, is the person I’ll be in a year or five. She’ll be happy to look back on 2024, and all the ways in which I managed to keep myself alive.
