I’ve just started watching Sapphire and Steel. Mostly because someone on twitter has mentioned it more than a few times now and the interest was peaked. If I’d seen this as a child I would have viewed the show and my little world differently. Or it would have all washed straight over me, as my ability to pick up deeper meaning within a tv show or film or book is something I’ve only really developed as an adult, and it’s still not spot on.

I was almost 7 months old when the first episode would have aired on ITV. (3 months later, I was apparently walking, so my mother once somewhat proudly declared.) It was not a show that featured in my childhood at all. Oddly, ITV programming generally didn’t get much of a look-in in our house. Something I still find intriguing today.

The concept that history is trapped in things and words around us is very obvious to me now. Nursery rhymes are a folk memory or mis-memory of the past. I don’t subscribe to the idea of stone tape theory but memories are attached in items and places. Those memories can be unlocked at certain points, by certain people who have shared the experience of the item and the person.

The words that are said, they always have meaning.

My father would mock me when his words to me were hurtful. “You need to grow thicker skin” As if I should just allow his bile you flow off of me. Because the hate that ran through him was so easy to throw away and hit someone else, your child, with.

Fuck you, old man.