1983

Road tripping isn't a recent invention, its simply the media for recording the journey that has changed.

The Blog as it's called today is a means of sharing not only with your friends and family, but the wider public as well the excitement, exposure and general wackyness of your experiences outside of your home environment.

In 1983 things were a little different, not only in the style (a la Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes) but also in the quaintly antique way we could record the highlights of such foreign sojourns.

In preparing for this trip I've had the opportunity to browse the historical archives of chez Shephard and one of the items I've reviewed is a faded Boots A6 Notebook which was faithfully used by my Mother to record not one, but two visits to the USA in the mid eighties by my parents.

The images that leap from the hand written narrative, paint a picture of wonder at the serving of 'Parisienne potates & buttered spinach' on the 'Wardair' operated aircraft, the 'great big armchair seats' of their rental car and take in the magnificent scenery of the places they visit, along with the odd gas mask wearing car driver during a forest fire and a cowboy and cowgirl they had occasion to give way to.

Something else that comes out of this personal prose are their meetings with the American people, whose names themselves seem strangely evocative of a bygone era; Francis & Eleanor Picksly, Fred McMann to name but a few.

The helpful Mormon family that extracate them from a problem involving car keys and a dinner date, or the elderly roadside purveyor of fruit who led them into his walk in fridge only to discover it was full of hanging dead Elk. So anxious to remove themselves from the local it was some time before they realised they had left my Mothers spectales and had to drive back to find them on his driveway!

All this is told in a neat script, where the pen changes frequently indicating in a subtle way the passage of time as the distances travelled are recorded along with the places stopped at, people met and meals consumed.

It is to be hoped that the technology of 2011, can at least in part evoke such a sense of wonderment and enthusiasm for the Americas and its peoples, whilst retaining the intamacy of the faded spiral bound A6 Boots notebook in the years to come.

Spiral bound Google blogs the next big thing in social antiquity?

Posted in: family,history