Memories are important.
Like stories and music and just
about everything else, they’re important because of the emotional attachment we
apply to them. Hey, what’s your favourite song? Have you and your husband or your
girlfriend ever heard a tune on the radio and said: “Hey! That’s our song!” before being swept up in a torrent of fond memories and musings and best-forgotten dance moves? Does knowing it’s someone
else favourite song or that it ‘belongs’ to a million other couples make it any less
unique or special to you?
Nope.
Because the memories conjured by
the melodies and the lyrics are yours and yours alone, and that’s what separates
it from every other song out there.
Terry Pratchett knew that Death
was coming for him. He knew that he was in the grip of Alzheimer’s and he
tackled it with the strength, nobility and humour that he lived the rest of his
life by. It was just another thing. He didn’t let it define him.
I wanted to contribute to this
anthology because Sir Terry is my favourite writer. I mean, this is the man who created all my favourite
characters this side of Batman!
I never knew Terry but — like songs — I knew
his characters in a way that no-one else could because I saw parts of myself in
them (and not always the good bits). Commander Vimes, Rincewind, Granny
Weatherwax, William de Worde… They may all exist in a fantasy land in some
distant corner of the multiverse, but anyone who’s ever read the stories in
which these characters (and hundreds more) appear will have glimpsed some facet of
themselves within them, even though they were born from
a single imagination.
Terry Pratchett showed us the
real world through a fantastical prism that made the good parts beautiful and
the ugly parts seem easy to fix, more often than not making us laugh while doing
so. These are just a couple of his greatest strengths as a writer, and as a
human.
My gran suffers from dementia.
For more than a decade I’ve watched her mind decline and slip and slide. It’s
not an easy thing to witness, because in this case, it has come to define her. And yet, I’ll always remember the woman she
was before this cruel disease gripped her. I’ll remember her sweeping onto a
bus every Sunday morning on her way to church and chatting to people that would
ignore her any other day of the week (smiling afterwards with an astute observation
that “There’s a big difference between Christianity and Churchianity”, a caveat which
I think Sir Terry would raise a wry smile to). I’ll remember her stories about
growing up in a post-war Glasgow that I’ll never get to know. I’ll remember how
she taught me not to cry whenever I’d fall and scrape my knees simply by forcing
myself to think about something else. But most of all I’ll remember her baking, and how she’d
accidentally-on-purpose slice too many apples for her apple tart and slip the
surplus to me, dusted with sugar, so it wouldn’t go to waste. (To this day I’ve
kept my promise not to tell my mum about that. I hope I can trust you with this
information.)
These days I blush when she has
one of her less lucid moments, looks at me and says: “You’re a fine young man. If I was your
age I’d fancy you”. Cheers Gran. Even now, your words and wisdom never fail to provide an ego
boost.
The strength of memories also,
tragically, hit my family even closer to home earlier this year.
In February, my dad passed away a
few weeks after suffering a stroke. He didn’t wake up after it, but he wasn’t
in any pain during his last days, and I think he knew he was surrounded by
family. I take comfort knowing this, and in the wealth of memories I have of
him. I take comfort in knowing that I can listen to his karaoke recordings of
Elvis and Billy Fury songs whenever I want (and he sang their songs better than
they did). I take comfort in seeing him within the photo frames where he sits
grinning at us, and in the many memories of his unflinching enthusiasm every
time he bought a Lotto ticket (“We’ll win it next week, wait and see”) and a million other things.
When a friend and mutual Discworld
enthusiast told me about this anthology and its theme, I knew I had to write
something, for myself if nothing else. I wanted to analyse why we place so much
significance in memories and what that importance means in the social media
age, where we constantly fret over how mega corporations use our private data
yet think nothing of publicly sharing our thoughts and photos — our memories — for
the world to see. Are they still important if they’re disposable? Do they carry
the same weight when we scroll through a conveyor of similar thoughts and
feelings from other people every day?
Well, that depends on you.
And that brings me to a close, to
offer humble thanks for being included in a body of work born from the love and
respect for a great writer and amazing human being — to The Vividarium, which is for my dad, my gran, and the memory of Sir
Terry Pratchett, if I can be so bold to hope that they would’ve liked it.
Thanks for the memories, and the stories that go with them.
Thanks for the memories, and the stories that go with them.
