How terrible news from an old friend sent me deep into the archives of a world before digital cameras

When Toby, a friend I’d known since meeting on an art foundation in Salisbury in the 1990s, sent word that things were not well in his world, the email was devastating. “Brain tumour, size of a plum already”, he wrote. “Inoperable. Months left – maybe a couple more.”

I knew immediately what I had to do and unearthed the box of old home movie tapes I hadn’t viewed in decades. Lugged around through the history of my rental addresses in a shoe box with a total disregard for varying extremes of temperature and moisture, I had no idea what I’d find, apart from – I hoped – Toby on some of them.

Few were even in the the right cases, with others containing the jeopardy of, “but is it really blank?”

I hadn’t organised anything coherently, of course, because... well... there is always more time for those type of jobs, isn’t there? Except now, of course, there wasn’t.

A shout-out on the neighbourhood WhatsApp group scored me a VHS player and I ordered some cables online.

In my teens, I’d held secret ambitions of being a film director and recorded as much of daily life on Video-C as I could (a now defunct format that fitted inside an adapter to play on a VHS recorder). Just try and explain this kind of obsolete technology to the horrified incomprehension of teens eyeing you like a delusional relic.

Back then, this was cutting edge technology, an expensive novelty even on the domestic market. Mobile phones so small you could fit them in your back pocket – holding thousands of still images and film clips – existed only as sci-fi sorcery.

This was an obtrusively large, black beast of a camera... because who else would bear witness to the transitioning of our 18-year-old lives? The following year, we would all be leaving our provincial towns across the country for university.

Going through them was miraculous, yet deeply unsettling, a portal to the already lost: times, places and even versions of ourselves that no longer exist. There were scraps of shared experience on these ribbons of degraded black silica – in them, I found teenage parties; hazy, murky living rooms full of dope smoke, The Levellers, The Wedding Present, John Lee Hooker – all new and exciting to us, blaring tinnily from a cheap cube hifi.

I recognised people whose names I had long forgotten, familiar then only from passing in college corridors, the friends that were at the centre of our world for that year that we no longer know... and Toby. A lot of Toby.

open image in gallery

We always remained in touch, however long the hiatus; jumping right back in the rhythm we always had. Full of exuberance and silliness; there he was doing an impression of Warhol in Ray-Bans, his easy machine-gun laugh, dancing and drinking, his then girlfriend Charlotte eye-rolling an apology as he gurned for the camera.

I digitised them and emailed them to him. We managed a lunch – which was to be the last time we saw each other. He was upbeat, but confessed staring at screens had become challenging and the coordination of texting ever more difficult.

I don’t know if he ever watched them. His past wasn’t as important as whatever was left of his present. He put them in a folder on his laptop for his kids, so if they want they can see what their father looked like when he was their age – carefree, drunk on snakebite, his nascent life before him and all its possibilities.

They would also be able to see a teenaged version of their mother too, as Charlotte and he were married in Australia a couple of years later.

This reflected a different time and aesthetic. There was no retouching here, no one posed for their best version, no second chance to relight, edit, filter, AI fill. Just spontaneous moments, the jarring honesty of smeared eyeliner, gurning awkwardly to the lens.

A moment I wish I could now gift to my kids, but it is a past world already. One they have no desire to understand.