Antique :-(

We went into school today for Dan and Abi's parents' evening. As ever, there was an opportunity to look at their work and mooch around the classroom. In year 5 there was this display, for one of those 'how things were in the old days' type of project. Not pictured - because I'd picked it up - was a book about Top Of The Pops in the 70s.

It's very odd to see your own childhood presented in this way, although I did experience something similar at Tate Liverpool's 'Glam' exhibition earlier this year. There was a short black and white film of some fans making there way to a Roxy Music gig. It all seemed appropriately far in the past - musically, Roxy Music were before my time - and yet those were the streets of my childhood. Not the actual streets, you understand, but they had the same feel: the sparser population of cars on the road, the telephone boxes, the fashions I'd seen my aunts and uncles wear.

It's weird to see history when you're connected to it and I wonder now what it was like for my grandparents when they saw footage of the war. It has always been abstract for me, another time completely and separate from me, but they were connected to it by the direct line of their own experience. Suddenly, I understand better the value of eye-witness accounts of past events. It's not necessarily that they know more facts about that time, it's simply that they were there, they had that direct experience of it as part of their lives: they know how it felt.

On a more flippant note, there was a stack of 7" singles behind the record player, including Heaven 17's '(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang' and also the picture disk of Blancmange's 'Feel Me', both records that I still own. That felt kind of weird, too; little bits of plastic in which I invested so much of my youthful passion, resting on a table as museum curiosities.