For years, professional journals and interest magazines have been accumulating here. There comes a time when they are SABLE, Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy, when there are just too many to sort. But professional journals contain legal updates so can’t simply be thrown out, while the interest magazines come with additional guilt.
Moving house would be the obvious time to go through them, but that’s also a time when further editions can be quietly stashed behind the façade of boxes by ‘helpful’ others. After time is spent setting up a new home around full-time work and other responsibilities, there isn’t much time left for finding and sifting through hidden boxes and the number when realised can be overwhelming.
Until now. I was sent home early in the current circumstances as my becoming unwell would be really, really expensive – not only would the lifespan of a keyworker be lost, but it would be resource-heavy on the way. So instead I’ve been sifting.
Some ‘recent’ ‘broad spectrum’ magazines are frightening in their causal racism and sexism. It speaks volumes about the views of the editing team and their intended demographic that these are the letters and opinions they were happy to publish. These were ‘given’ to me by someone who wanted rid, without actually being rid. I won’t name the journal or cite any here – besides the flamewar, I don’t think I could stand that demographic attempting to justify themselves. The context shows they weren’t joking.
But others are a happy reminder of what’s been forgotten, even if launched with great fanfare at the time. This includes the Radio Times Genome, all listings from the Radio Times from 1923 to 2009. Letters afterwards are a mix of people delighted that they can find the work of relatives they were only told of years later or childhood programmes that they’d forgotten and enjoyed reminiscing about. The later will become more important over time – digging out buried happy memories is a therapy used in mental health and dementia.
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