Piecing Together The Past

I used to collect everything. No matter where I went, what I did, who I was with, I would gather together the remnants of the trip and keep them. I called them my 'souvenirs'. These items were anything from napkins to train tickets to leaflets to feathers to stickers... Anything and everything that could hold some memory of the day.

I stuck these treasures into scrapbooks (and the larger items, those that wouldn't bend or fold, went into my 'souvenir box'). I had an image in my mind of myself in decades to come, looking through the brittle pages, being transported back into the past, to happy days and fun times. I imagined sharing these memories with my children, perhaps even grandchildren.

But time marches of and things change and life gets too busy to collect little treasures. Sometimes life gets too busy to even go anywhere or do anything that makes collecting things worthwhile. That's how I felt for a long time. Years. My scrapbooks grew thinner and thinner, and finally around six years ago, I stopped filling them at all.

Recently, however, things have changed. My daughter is now three, and she attends a wonderful nursery school (Combe Bank in Sundridge, Kent). They are looked after there, they are taught well. And they have each - every single student - been given a scrapbook to fill in. These scrapbooks are given out at the beginning of each year, and are used as focal points for classroom discussions - a kind of show and tell. Helping Alice to complete her scrapbook has been fun. It reminded me of my own, and I even dug some of them out, and teared up looking through the - yes, slightly brittle - old pages.

Memories resurfaced, and it was wonderful.

So now, Alice and I are working on scrapbooks together. I hope in years to come, we will both be able to look back through them and remember the wonderful days we spent together.

Why not try it for yourself?