The Coal-man.
She sat listening to him and thought how marvelous it all sounded. A variety of household economies, all arriving at the front door by horse and cart. Milk, coal, bread and parcel mail. There was even a rag & bone man, who came to take away your old clothes, scrap metal, broken tools and yes... bones if you had any - for the manufacture of buttons and glue. Fleets of men and animals, working for suburban Britain.
He has no photographs to prove any of this, no album of sepia-coloured snapshots, just the extraordinary memory of it all. Except, of course, none of it was extraordinary to him. And that might explain the lack of photos. No-one, who could afford a camera, thought it was worth photographing back then. It was just life. It hadn't become history yet. But we take his word for it all, with absolute confidence. Why would we not?
That's the remarkable thing about the past. More often than not we have to be happy with hearing history, not viewing it. The people who were actually there were not even remotely considering keeping a record of the mundane everyday. They were mostly wondering what was for dinner.
My Dad has been telling quite a lot of these stories lately. Some are objectively unique - As an eight-year old, looking up at the smoke trails of the fighters and bombers that Battled for Britain. As an Army lance-corporal serving in a Tank regiment near Suez. Historical milestones that we still refer to in initials - JFK, MLK, the Cold War playing out live. He watched all of that turbulence in the new-fangled splendour of an 18-inch, black and white TV.
He lived through the arrival of technicolour, commercial air travel, supermarkets, credit cards, computers, mobile phones and a much-debated Moon landing.
I like these stories - not because they feel in any way curious, or distant - but because they are told as a mere matter of casual, historical fact.
They're about how things arrived at the house. What people ate. What kids did. Who lived down the road. Things that nobody at the time would have thought worth recording because they weren't remarkable - yet.
And there aren't that many photographs.
My Dad has perhaps five photographs from his childhood. I haven't counted them, so five may turn out to be seven or twelve, but the point is that there aren't 38,462 of them.
They're faded, slightly battered old things. Each one seems to contain an enormous amount of information, perhaps precisely because there are so few of them. Someone points to a face, and then remembers a name, and within minutes the photograph has opened a door into a place of kind nostalgia, that no longer exists.
Which got me thinking about the "old people" of the future. And this is not meant as a cheap jab at the Millennials...Although... I could choose to go through the door marked "Unfavourable Comparisons" and quietly postulate when today's twenty-somethings are sat by the virtual fireplace, with their virtual grandchildren - all they will have to show are a thousand-and-one pictures of their breakfast.
But I won't...
Although now, I can't un-think it...
“What was happening here, Virtual Grandad?”
“Those were called smashed avocados.”
“Were they especially rare?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Then why did you image-capture them?”
“We all did.”
“Why?”
“Nobody really knows...”
Nonsense, of course. I think every generation seems fully convinced that the one following right along is somehow more shallow, less interesting, curious and relevant than "Generation Me". The Romans were complaining about young people thousands of years ago, and ten thousand years prior to that, somebody living in a cave thought to bemoan the fact that "The youth of today, just don't know the first thing about how to cook and serve a good Woolly Mammoth..."
Listen...the youth of today aren't doing anything fundamentally different. They're recording their lives as best they know how - with an iPhone over a breakfast plate. The impulse is pretty much the same. What has changed, is perhaps the essential nature of their experiences.
Abundance is trying so hard to eclipse substance. We have thousands of photographs and, increasingly, seem to tell very few stories around them. Most of them are not even ours. We are only very loosely connected to the memories stored in our iCloud accounts. I have 860 followers on my business Facebook page - and of all of them - I have met eleven.
I think we might all glorify a little bit of abundance. Dad has five photos; I have five thousand.
Lucky me?..
Now I'm not so sure.
Because when there was no photograph of the coalman, the memory was nevertheless obliged to take up residence somewhere...And perhaps when the story was done being told, it was dusted off and put back on the shelf. Someone might have asked a question. Someone else might have remembered something - a detail was added. Another corrected. The story was carried around and either shrunk or exaggerated by people because there was nowhere else to put it.
We don't have that problem. We have largely outsourced our memories. Our phones do the majority of the remembering for us - where we were, with whom and eating what. Even where we were parked. The cloud remembers everything.
The trouble is, it treasures absolutely nothing.
Forty thousand photographs of your life are almost certainly sat in a data center just outside Luton - perfectly preserved in digital aspic - and not one of them has a decent story to tell down the pub.
Which brings me to an uncomfortable question, because finding significance in ordinary things is, after all, pretty much what floats my boat. I've written in bulk about sandwiches, shame, cake and Christmas. Holidays, cheese, and sitting in railway stations. Things that, by any reasonable measure, don't really deserve an entire essay written about them. Although...
So where exactly is the line between declaring that I am noticing the beauty of ordinary life and simply glorifying the borifying? What makes "Ode to a ham sandwich" any different from a photograph of my brunch captioned - "Living the Dream?..
I'm not entirely sure about that, either.
Perhaps it begins with attention. Not photographing something. Noticing it. Asking why, or how or even WTF..?
Actually being present long enough for an apparently insignificant thing to register. The way somebody looks at their dog. The smell of wet leaves. The sound of a bee in a lavender bush.
But it's not just about the noticing... A ham sandwich is still the same ham sandwich, even after I have stared thoughtfully at it for ten minutes. If I'm going to wax lyrical about the thing, I have to find whatever thread connects it to something larger and true and meaningful. Otherwise I'm merely putting a pretty plate underneath it and declaring it "Nice"...
And so with all that neatly discussed and contemplated, we can gently slide into the next, slightly uncomfortable modern complication:
The audience.
My Dad was definitely not creating content when the coal-man arrived on Tuesdays.
He wasn't thinking about how the moment might look later. Nobody was watching him, or giving him marks-out-of-ten on being a twelve year old. There was no second version of himself standing outside the experience deciding whether it was worth sharing.
He was just in it.
We still do that, of course. The youth of today haven't stopped having authentic experiences simply because they own iPhones. They still fall in love, drink too much, get frightened, make mistakes and laugh until something hurts. But they now have the option, almost constantly, to step outside the experience while they're still having it. To become both participant and archivist.
We no longer need to remember the moment because the phone will do it for us. And increasingly, we don't simply experience the moment because some small part of us is already considering how it might look afterwards.
We have now not only outsourced the memory but also acquired the audience.
Which makes this an awkward observation for Platform 13. Because on Platform 13, we could get this wrong just as easily.
The occupational hazard of finding beauty in ordinary things is eventually deciding that ordinary things are beautiful simply because they're ordinary. Pretty soon you're draping enormous significance over a cat sat on a mat, because ordinary-things-are-beautiful has become the house style.
I'm probably one lazy afternoon away from doing exactly that...
The only test I can think of is whether the meaning was genuinely found or deliberately manufactured.
And maybe the uncomfortable part is that I'm not certain you can always tell, from the inside, which one you're doing.
My Dad, on the other hand, isn't trying.
He doesn't remember the coal-man because the coal-man represents a vanished Britain, or the transience of human existence, or where the world was headed.
He remembers the coal-man because there was a coal-man. And he came on a Tuesday.
Perhaps that's why his five photographs contain so much. They weren't asked to remember his childhood for him. They simply opened the door on it. His recollection does the rest.
And maybe I'm being unfair to the old people of the future. Perhaps sixty years from now, somebody's grandchild will sit beside them and scroll through forty thousand photographs, using their iSpeed reader headset, until they find one particular picture of a completely unimportant breakfast.
They'll point at something in the corner.
“Who's that, Grandad?..”
And a story will begin. Perhaps that's all the photograph was ever supposed to do.
Not remember the story. Just open the door and let it walk on in. I genuinely don't know.
But I do know that while my Dad talked, and Vanessa listened, she didn't take a single photograph.
And she remembers all of it.
On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.
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