There’s a moment in the 2010 film Due Date, when the odd couple on a comedy road trip stand in the lobby of a motel as they realize they don’t have enough money to stay there. As they leave the building, one of them runs back in to pick up a brochure for his scrapbook: the joke being that he hasn’t even stayed there. He’s a painfully uncool guy all round ….so part of the joke is that he’s the kind of person who keeps a scrapbook in the first place.
About a year after that film came out, I emigrated from the UK to the Middle East with my family and decided to embrace the uncool. I bought a spiral-bound scrapbook, plain beige cover, in the “For Men Who Are Reflective But Haven’t Lost Sight Of Their Masculinity” section of Paperchase. I knew that one day I’d be back in the UK and, years down the line, would want to settle down on a cold winter evening (with my feet in comfy slippers perched next to a scented log fire, perhaps) and disappear, without any illegal plant-based assistance, into a haze of reverie (as I believe it is called).
But my scrapbook is not a hobby. It’s a tool.
I’ve found that my memory and recollection, across a span of years, is like a hospital heart rate (ECG) monitor: it’s a flat line with periodic spikes. If you think about a ten-year span in your life, you’ll find memory “spikes”, usually “events” like births, deaths, marriages and holidays. But in between those spikes, recollection is out of focus and like a flat line.
A scrapbook / log of life reminds me that I’ve had more going on in the “flatline” periods than I care to remember even though socially I’m far from hyper-active (and compared to some people I know, I can feel like a championship-level hermit). A scrapbook/log has turned out to be a surprising gauge for someone like me who thinks they don’t ever “do” anything.
A friend from a while back used to keep one book, and one book only, for each year of his life, labeling each on the front in thick marker, simply “2004, 2005…etc.”. That struck me as a powerful way of injecting clarity into the blur of a decade by creating pauses and structure in panoramic memory. Otherwise oneyearjustblendsintoanother.
Or, to deploy another analogy, this approach is like the dietician’s advice to slow down and chew your food more and think about what you’re eating to make you feel fuller for longer, rather than munching absent-mindedly and then wondering how you got through that tube of Pringles so quickly. Deliberately structuring the recording of time and memories makes me feel I’ve lived the years that otherwise seem to flash by.
You may think this is a waste of time. Of course, if you’re gifted with a photographic memory and an automatic chronological or subject-indexed cerebral filing system with 1080p Mind’s Eye Recall-on-Demand capability, then I agree, a scrapbook is a waste of time.
If my scrapbook was a hobby then each time I opened its pages I’d be greeted with an explosion of kitsch and fuss and adornment. Instead, my book is stripped-down, no frills (again maybe something to do with that subconscious masculine voice in my head). Just a book and glue stick, so it’s just a case of paste and then paste again. No captions or commentary. The content speaks for itself and doesn’t need the microphone of glitter pens or floral-pattern stencils. Keeping it simple means keeping it going is easy – there is no artistry to perfect.
It has no photos, it’s just reserved for paraphernalia and mementoes I’ve picked up: tickets, receipts, postcards, menus, leaflets. It’s about places I’ve visited, I’ve eaten at, events I’ve attended. This is about recording experiences, not nice things I have bought. So shop receipts for a Macbook Air, a Tag Heuer wristwatch or a Gucci black crocodile-skin loafer fully lined with kangaroo hide and finished with signature horsebit detail (yes, there is and, no, I don’t) are not the kind of memory triggers I am talking about.
My book makes room for “everyday” items that might not mean a great deal now but will act as a kind of time capsule. It’s half scrapbook, half log of life, with all the items having one thing in common: they are things I want to remember (even if it would leave others nonplussed). If I produced a scrapbook with one eye on an outside audience, I’d end up not giving myself the gift of a personally meaningful record of my past, but instead a record of how I want to be perceived by others (and if I wanted that I always have Instagram).
I have found it invaluable to record as much of the journey as possible (without being obsessive) to capture a fuller sense of my own experiential self-identity. (I can’t think of a less “self-help” way to word that. I know it sounds like something you might read on the back cover of a book called “Discover Your Inner Self, Conquer Your Outer Reality – In Fifty-Two Easy Steps!”).
With this minimalist approach, you might think why not just keep all this stuff in a box file and fish it out when a surge of nostalgia hits? The answer is that even a basic level of “curating” the material, i.e. pasting it chronologically in a book, always makes me want to dip into it because it’s easier to digest.
After all, I can pick up a scoop of ice cream using my bare hands and it will taste like ice cream, but I’d rather eat it from a cone.