Spent the weekend celebrating Kirsty’s Mum’s Birthday drinking a big chunk of the alcohol which was meant to be drunk at the party which never happened because Ken (her husband) dove for a ball while playing cricket and fractured his collar bone as well as dislocating it and was meant to be in hospital having an operation but wasn’t because the most recent consultant he saw decided that it might heal itself in time and was probably best left although he still has a lump on his left shoudler where what ever it is is sticking up. They also have a nice new digital cam-corder.

As we all know, when someone has a cam-corder there’s a few things which we are all obliged to do.

• Firstly if you notice you are being recorded you must make sure we wave and grin and pull silly faces. It’s the LAW!
• Secondly if you’re holding the camera you must be sure to try to get at least a little footage of those who don’t know they’re being filmed. We’ve all heard the mantra of the fly-on-the-wall documentary makers “it has to be real, it has to be real” and this also applies to you!
• Finally when all the days activities are done it’s absolutely essential that you take a bit of time, sit down in the front room and watch the entire days events back from beginning to end. Obviously this won’t take as long as it took to live it (unless you literally never turned the camera off) and it will also have the added benifit that you’ll be able to see the day from a completely different perspective.

I was wondering what effect all this has on my memory. Am I going to find in years to come that my real memories of days are replaced with the video footage I’ve watched over and over. How unreal is it for my memories to be based on video? Does the video camera necessarily have a more restricted view of events than I do? Or does watching the days events back a few times afterwards actually help to solidify your impressions and make the resulting memories strong and more lasting.

Just wondering.