‘Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone’
or
‘Catch your dreams before they slip away’
The lyrics of Ruby Tuesday never made sense to me but what a melodic and catchy song it is. Perhaps it’s not anthemic enough to feature in a global top 50 of the best songs of all times if only because The Rolling Stones probably have a dozen other contenders. It’s one of my favourites and another is Angie.
I had five topics on my mind for today’s journal when I sat at my non-musical keyboard. Ignobility (coming soon), land mine clearance (ditto), wedding anniversaries (maybe not), birds of passage (maybe) and the rediscovery of more information about Robert Mallett (one day soon).
The Mallett story brought islands to mind. And island related seismic activity got me to thinking about Krakatoa, that famous island to the west of Java.
And such is the mind that I thought of the pumice floating on the sea as we approached Krakatoa January 2006. And then a particular photograph came to mind. So I hunted for it and located the original on a back-up disk. The photograph above was taken with the Sony DCR-PC350E video camera I carried around the world for years. The Sony camera stored the video on 4mm mini-dv cassette tapes and the stills as JPGs on memory sticks shaped like chewing gum. Sony have a habit of creating future nightmares from innovative ideas that fail to get universal support. That’s why I switched to Canon and Fuji. Sadly, the brilliant Sony Handicam that lasted me for six years has left me with a conservation and curation challenge.
And being a significant wedding anniversary, it was easy to make a mental leap to the lyrics of Ruby Tuesday. Maybe I had six, no seven ideas for today’s journal.
Yesterday does matter to me and I really do want to be able to see photographs of my yesteryears on demand. Just like I want to be able to read what I have written when I want. The curse of digital media is that the promised permanence of digital information is compromised by transient formats.
As I get older and older, slipping beyond my legacy years, I want to catch hold of my photographic memories before they become like phantasms and disappear, as the wake fades behind a boat.
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