I’ve been making a pathetic attempt to tidy – and instead of starting with big stuff, I’m going through my bookcases. Poked in among the books was a video tape; along the spine where a title or description should go there was teeny-weeny-tiny writing almost completely faded. It was printed and seemed like random names, not a title as such. It definitely wasn’t my writing, or husband’s, or any of our parents, but I thought it might be one of my uncles. He took cine-films and then later moved on to videos so we wondered if it might be one of his – I inherited most of their photos etc when they died.
I couldn’t make out any of the words, but there was a scrap of notepaper, also very faded, pushed in the video box. Half was illegible, but half had some names and what might have been phone numbers followed by some sort of code made up of numbers and letters – not postcodes though. I tried to look up the names, but without success and I was left wondering, who was Terry Rickell? Or John Tounant, who was he? And Keith Few – or was he Pew? And does that say Howard Blater, or Baxter, or Benter? I shall never know of course, but those names could be very useful as characters in my writing!