I’ve protected them for almost five decades. A journey across Asia, a sojourn in London, a flight across the Atlantic, car and truck rides around the USA and then ignominiously left almost abandoned on a shelf. Stored in acid free sleeves, I pull them out and remarkably no scratches, no dust nor water damage. These artifacts of a bygone analog world have finally bubbled to the top of my bucket list.
Like many, like most, my earliest journey was to the beat of an educational drum. Mine was more stumbling, falling and desperately hustling than a typical marathon. Nonetheless, I’ve made it and have graduated from a UK university with a Math and Computer Science degree. My pride, my sense of relief and my optimism for the future are so tangible. After fours years I’m returning to London and at this point simply need to be there in early September.
Almost three months later and around six thousand miles on trains, my journey around India and Nepal is history. I’ve changed in a positive way, more aware of the richness of humankind, more aware of the “luck” of growing up in London and a sense of nascent humbleness that we are not always masters of our own destiny.
I slide the negative onto a light box. The modern day scanner is a digital camera with a macro lens. I focus on the grain. It’s all very fiddliey and I repeat it for each and every snap. I’m amazed, the detail, the clarity make me reassess my view of 1970s analog camera lenses. No computer design, no computer aided manufacturing, just craftsmanship. Minolta did just fine.
On a limited budget my ten week journey was mainly color slides. Looking back all seem to capture a road, a temple and while “boring” is an unfair descriptor, it seems my approach to black and white was the opposite. Virtually every picture has a human within. Decades on these are quite engaging and show a time now long lost.
I came to this with purpose. A digital archive was not the goal. It had to be something tangible, viewable and engaging. Pictures on the wall? Maybe but in a way the only real end goal was a book. No sense of publishing, just a book that might sit on my coffee table, may come with me to see friends or maybe one day be a simple residue of a life well lived.
I labored, I iterated, I sought critique from my wife and from friends. Perfection is the always the enemy of good enough and at some point you have to press the “buy” button and I did.
At first the food was a challenge, as weeks went by it became abysmal and at the end I returned to London only to be invited to spend a week at the Tropical Diseases Hospital.
It’s September and I’ve started my new job. I’ve had many jobs before but this is my first as a graduate and hopefully the start of a “real” career.
Most get offered an opportunity to work on pedestrian Cobol business software as was I. Timing can be everything. The chance to work on something far more contemporary than Cobol is broached. It’s a bespoke product using one of Intel’s first commercially viable CPUs as a stock taking aid for Allied Breweries, Britain’s biggest.
Cool tech and beer, that’s my kind of project.
However, it came with a catch that deliverable dates meant starting next Monday.
I share my India highlights and that I really need to be boarding at the Tropical Diseases for a week. Could we defer the start date?
Sympathy but simple this, “it’s your choice, Intel on Monday or Cobol after NHS”.
In the space of four months, India made me a better person and secondarily, I learnt that sometimes opportunities come knocking that you really have to grab.
Intel and the years that followed were beyond fun. An easy choice in hindsight but…..
The book is a homage to those four transformative months for a very young man.
……oh, the bucket list has one less item…..that feels good too.