Colm O'Regan: These papers are precious heirloom of memory

From preserving postcards to my grandfather in 1915 to reminiscing over old football magazines, archiving paper documents is a masterclass in nostalgia

Where are your papers? Don’t worry, I’m not the border police. I mean, where are the paper bits of your life? Do you have them anymore? Did you ever have them?

I’m knee-deep in archiving. And by archiving, I mean, there is an enormous pile of ‘stuff’ in the house I grew up in and I’m putting it into a few boxes. Letters, photos, documents, ephemera. 

There is no attempt at any further granularity other than A Few Big Boxes. If I sat down to read the stuff properly, I’d be there all year. So for now, I’m like the Baltimore cops in The Wire, marking stuff as Pertinent and non-Pertinent.

Non-Pertinent should, in theory, go in the bin. But I’m starting to agonise. A brochure for life insurance from 1985 or a docket for grass seed can probably be thrown out. But wait! That life insurance company no longer exists, and look at the exquisite design on the McKenzies docket.

There are reams of documents from my father’s farming days, a record of a small farm with all the various paperwork from the Department and the EEC. Dada’s handwriting is there. I imagine him muttering about bureaucracy as he puts in cattle birth dates and goes looking for an envelope, and a stamp.

Some stuff is proper Museum Grade. There’s a postcard to my grandfather from 1915. The postcard commemorates the death of
Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. The date on the postcard is 1/8/15. No need for 1915. Will I get to write the same year in two different centuries?

But we don’t even need to go back that far. Everything now is history. 1999 used to be just down the road. Now it’s barely visible.

From 1999, I find the first tentative invitation to the Dripsey shortest St Patrick’s Day parade Guinness Book of Records bid. The map of the parade route is hand-drawn. It was only 25 yards.

The invitation says,“ASSEMBLE”. Like it was calling on the Dripsey Avengers. So that piece of paper is going straight into the Pertinent pile.

Some items surprise me. I was all set to throw out most of the mass cards, apart from the ones for my father. What’s in a mass card anyway? It’s just a holy picture. A template. An excerpt from a psalm. But it has the name and sometimes the photo of the dead person. In theory, there is probably someone else to remember them. But you can’t take that for granted. So now there is a box marked “Mass Cards.”

The whole experience runs the gamut of emotions. From the ‘ahhhhh, look’ of a wedding telegram sent to my parent’s wedding in 1965, to the anger I feel when I see a flurry of solicitors’ letters where someone didn’t pay my father what he was owed.

My eyes narrow. My lips curl in hostility as I take up cudgels on his behalf, decades later.

My brother’s old football magazines show players interviewed and their favourite food is “steak and chips” and they like watching The Sweeney on a newly-acquired colour TV.

Some of the players would like to be managers. And became managers. And are now retired or dead managers. Could time just slow for a fecking second? Please?

I don’t know what my papers will look like. Printing out an email that reads, ‘Re: Re: Re: Re: Invoice for payment,’ doesn’t seem very edifying but maybe I should? I can always chop off the footer which has a targeted ad for hair transplants on it. Actually, I’ll leave it in.

So where are your papers? Should we all be building a museum for ourselves? Who would go?

Maybe, we will leave it up to future generations to decide.