Rabbit Holes

History & Research, Personal, Sound & Audio, Technology, , , , ,

Sorting and tidying following Paul’s death is an ongoing activity. I have barely scratched the surface, if I’m being honest. The easiest things to dump — ancient magazine back issues, bank statements from long-defunct accounts, that kind of thing — are quickly dealt with. Paul’s amateur radio gear was taken away by members of the local club. I am now getting down to deeper layers, where I am finding things harder to just pitch into a bin bag.

Video8 and Hi8 cassettes hiding in a file box.

Let’s look at the audio visual things. Paul and I were both interested in audio and video. We acquired high-end domestic Video8 and Hi8 camcorders and so on, and spent many a happy hour making recordings. We never made a serious film, mainly because editing back in the 1990s was hard work involving at least two playback machines, one recording machine, and some kind of interface to deal with fades, effects and titles. The main thing was we never threw anything away. I have dozens of cassettes of raw footage from all kinds of events and expeditions.

As the technology improved we moved up to digital video camcorders. We even made the effort to move to computer editing. Clumsy, slow, and prone to failure, it was still a step up from the strictly analog edits that went before.

By the time solid state recording equipment was arriving, we had kind of lost interest in making movies. As I type it’s amazing to think I carry a 4K video capture device in my pocket every day. At a stroke, my mobile phone made all the expensive gear from thirty years ago completely redundant!

MiniDV cassettes. Never trust what is scribbled on a label!

Having sorted all these tapes, and decided there were some nuggets worth panning out, I wondered if any of the hardware stashed in various camera bags around the house would still be functional after all these years. If the dreaded drive belt rot had affected the camcorders, then I would have to decide if it was really worth the time and expense of finding a facilities house that could transfer the tapes to a more digital friendly format.

Sony TRV-900 MiniDV camcorder.

After a bit of time I had gathered three camcorders, and matched them up with their power supplies and batteries. Amazingly, with charged batteries, all three units came to life. I tested cassettes that I knew were blank and most things functioned as expected. Nothing got mangled or stretched. I was surprised, to say the least.

Do I have a plan? Well, I suppose I would like to be able to review most of the tapes to see what they have recorded on them. There’s a whole box full of tapes, for example, recording an event that took place in the Historic Dockyard in Chatham. There may be historical footage in that collection that will be worth saving, and might be of interest to someone. I need to find the time to set the gear up to review the tapes properly, and then be able to digitise what I want to save, and then edit the footage so it’s suitable for uploading to YouTube or similar.

I just need to find the time.

Letting go

Personal, ,

I always quite liked Thursdays. At my secondary school, Thursday was an Art double period day. As a child it was a Blue Peter day. As I got older, it was a Tomorrow’s World and Top Of The Pops and, later still, Top Gear day. 

Paul died on a Thursday. The day has since taken on a different meaning. It has became a kind of marker. I kept count of the weeks as they ticked by, After Paul, Thursday after Thursday.

Until now. I’ve lost count. We are somewhere beyond twelve weeks, coming up for four months. I could tot them up on a calendar to remind myself, or perhaps continue to remember on the sixth day of each new month. Perhaps now is the proper time to stop counting the weeks or months, and leave my memories to an anniversary.

Grief still catches me, but it is becoming less raw as time passes. The process of clearing and sorting Paul’s things is very much still ongoing, as I wrote last time. The process of getting the property into my name has begun, but the gears of English law turn slowly.

Medical issues still burden me, preventing me making definite plans. A model railway meeting in October and a big model show in November, have been marked in my calendar. I hope I will be fit by then. A sort of bucket list of places, mostly round the UK, I’d really like to visit is brewing, too. Perhaps researching for such adventures will help me reset my life.

After all, life must go on.

Endings and beginnings

Personal, , ,

You can plan for such events. You can mentally rehearse outcomes. You can make arrangements to try to ease things.

It still hits you like a ton of bricks when it actually happens.

When I last posted Life Things, while not exactly rosy, were beginning to look a little brighter. Only a few days after the post, it all came crashing down.

My husband, Best Beloved, Paul to his friends and loved ones, died in the early hours of 6 February 2025.

Paul was 85 years old. We had been a couple for most of the last 35 years, though we only married in 2021. He had been frail for some time, and as you know if you’re a regular reader I was his carer as well as his wife and companion.

I will find the strength to write more fully about Paul and his life at a later date. For now, I need to grieve, and to think about where my life must lead now I am again on my own.

Worrying times

Personal, Wittering, , , , , ,

I am conscious that I particularly want to avoid talking about what’s going on outside my little bubble. Trying to comment on the political world in previous iterations of this blog just made things worse for me and my mental health. I am about to touch on things happening right now, but I do not plan to make it a habit.

Writing a blog regularly is hard. I’ve already written about it. It doesn’t get any easier as time goes on, because the small pool of ideas rapidly evaporates and I forget to replenish it. I have ideas, but they need time to set seed and germinate – and I have to remember to actually care for those seeds so I can harvest the fruit.

(I’ll stop that analogy right now. Sorry.)

The world is undergoing several types of massive convulsion. Not much is of a good kind. It is not easy to see a bright side, and I admit my mental health is taking yet another battering. I try to do the self-care thing, but it’s not easy.

How about, then, I write a bit about what’s going on here at Snaptophobic Towers? You may find it interesting, you may not. It’s my party and I’ll do what I want.

Continue reading Worrying times →