Scrapbooks by Sarah Nicholson

By -

 As we near the end of the school holidays I’m wondering if summer scrapbooks are still a “thing”?

I used to enjoy collecting tickets, stickers, tourist leaflets and other paraphernalia with my children to document the fun we had over the six weeks creating a permanent keepsake.

A collage of summer scrap!

Once or twice, there were competitions at school for the “best” scrapbook after the holidays, but as with most of these things it is impossible for all parents to compete especially with the families who jet off on lavish foreign holidays and generally have more disposable income for more exciting activities. 

It’s not a level playing field when the only excitement you have to write about is … the local playing field!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/w9ned/3883245679/

And yet making a scrapbook, as the name suggests, can be a very inexpensive activity. It is just a patchwork of ephemera.

When I was a very small child, I had several scrapbooks which I filled with random pictures cut out of magazines and the latest Avon catalogue. It is an eclectic mix with no discernible narrative although I might have made up a story in my head at the time.

Maybe the first book I ever produced?


I’ve loved cutting and sticking ever since.

My eldest son is a sports journalist and quite early in his career I got excited and immensely proud seeing his byline in print. I saved a stack of newspapers, bought him a scrapbook, and told him to stick the articles in.

Of course, he DIDN’T!

So last time I visited him I brought them all home with me, cut out the relevant bits and even filed them in date order. However even I lost interest and never got around to the gluing bit of the operation. I’m hoping writing this might spur me on to complete my summer project!

words as well as pictures

Thankfully he hasn’t saved any printed articles for a long time, most of his work is digital now. I’m sure there must be a way to produce a digital scrapbook, in much the same way as we produce digital photo albums … that we then get printed.

Because at the end of the day there is something special about having something to hold in your hand. A keepsake, a reminder of what you have done and achieved, whether in the six week summer holiday or part of your career..

Now where did I put my glue stick?

Comments

Peter Leyland said…
That was a really interesting post for me Sarah because I have used scrapbooks in so many ways - off the top of my head when my life had taken a severe downturn I collected theatre tickets, certificates, maps, photos, programmes, train time-tables and so on into a scrapbook, all things that suggested I would get better. Once, for a very difficult pupil, I suggested to his parents that they get him to make a scrapbook of his two-week term time holiday, and it worked. He came back, showed it to me proudly and joined in with the class. He had achieved something.

I'm sure there are ways to produce a digital scrapbook. Recently my brother Paul showed me one that one of his sons had produced for him using such a site. It was all about his love of birdwatching, photos and descriptions that Paul had made and collected in the course of his lifetime observations. It was beautiful.

4 September 2023 at 14:48
Cecilia Peartree said…
I too love cutting and sticking, and your post has reminded me that somewhere in the clutter that has occupied our conservatory since my son de-cluttered another room in the house there is a scrapbook of one of my American trips, with tickets from the El in Chicago and souvenirs of the Field Museum among other things. Elsewhere in the clutter is actually a brand new scrapbbook that I've been intending to fill with some souvenirs of my past career, only my retirement has been too busy and I haven't had time. I've created photobooks for some of our previous holidays too (I usually use Photobox for this).
One of my sons was obsessed with bridges when he was about 4 or 5 - I really thought he was destined to become a civil enginee, only he discovered computers - and we filled a whole scrapbook with pictures of various bridges from magazines etc. I had thought he must be unique in being interested in this kind of thing until I happened to be chatting to someone at a work meeting who said she would be going home afterwards to get on with her young son's model of the Thames Flood Barrier!
5 September 2023 at 13:12
Sarah said…
I'm glad my post has provoked some happy memories - thanks for sharing Peter and Cecilia. :-)
5 September 2023 at 17:18
Post a Comment

Popular posts

A Few Discreet Words About Caesar's Penis--Reb MacRath

By -
Image
Veni, vidi...Wiki! Not long ago I had the all-time greatest Great Idea: one, born of total ignorance, that nearly tanked a novel. As you may have guessed from my opening line, my subject is Julius Caesar. But you might not have guessed from the title that my Great Idea entailed his being reborn as a penis. Don't laugh, please, I beg you. I saw no way around this, even though showing JC as a 'dick' might lead some to think that I've written a spoof. In fact, it's a serious thriller. Without giving the plot away, I can say this: I needed JC's ghost, today, remembering his nights with Cleopatra on her fabled golden barge. There  was the heart of my book--a ghost trying for 2000 years to relive that lost boogie with Liz. And I'd begun to run with this when my memory corrected me: Mark Anthony, not JC, was on the barge with Cleo. And this was after JC's death. What the hell was I to do, lacking the good sense to check memory's 'facts
Read more

Margery Allingham and ... knitting? Casting on a summer’s mystery -- by Julia Jones

By -
Image
The Watchtower from the Saltings  (Photo Tom Barr)  How to connect a 1940s naval watchtower on the Tollesbury marshes, a brilliant Scottish knitwear designer and my all-time favourite novelist?   The investigation led me along the single-track lanes south-east from Tollesbury, heading towards the end of the old railway line to Tollesbury Pier. I began to get goosebumps as I remembered coming here before. Once on a long walk with my dog, when I was never quite sure where we were trespassing but was determined to explore anyway.  That was when I first saw the six-sided building, stark and guarded against the weather. Then I saw it again in my imagination: ‘It’s a t-tower,’ said David. Xanthe loved the way he said it with a shiver of excitement in his voice. ‘It’s in the m-middle of a f-field and it looks right down the r-river.’ ‘And when it was wartime the Navy built it so they could keep a lookout against invaders,’ added Kieran. ‘Then p-zow they’d press a button and the whole
Read more

As Time Goes By

By -
Image
 Dooley Wilson, Ingrid Bergman, "Play it, Sam." 1942 I turn 87 on the 16th of this month. That means I was five years old when Ilsa Lund asked Sam to play As Time Goes By . No wonder I've been a lifelong romantic (who writes about time travel a lot.) I vaguely remember first seeing Casablanca at a theatre with my mother. She elbowed me from a Hershey-bar stupor to see one of her Hollywood bit-actor friends, Frank Puglia, as a Moroccan vendor selling Ingrid Bergman a scarf. I posted about Puglia here in 2020. (See " The Phantom of Dream Streets .") It was 1943. I was a precocious kid who could read the funnies and the headlines of newspapers delivered to our front steps every day. I hid under a marble-topped coffee table during air raid drills, laughing at the game of sirens, closed drapes and wardens waving hooded flashlights.  My mother, wth my Nonna Rosa, c. 1960 My Rome-born Nonna Rosa, still kept milk in an "ice-a-box." She didn't own an elec
Read more

What's Your Angle--by Reb MacRath

By -
Image
You may be in either camp or be a hybrid, as I am. In the course, though, of writing a novel we may all come to the same block: we know where to go  and exactly what to do there...but we can't seem to figure out how to get there smoothly and efficiently. I found myself on a roll with my WIP when the ending of the seventh chapter threw me for a loop. Consider: Chapter 7 ends with two of the three main characters--let's call them A and B--engaged in risky business in a small Arizona town. They've arranged for C to follow them days later on a different pretext, apparently looking for work. But, unknown to them, something has happened in Tucson. Chapter 8. Change of POV. Cut to character C, left behind in Tucson. Because of what's happened, he chooses to leave a day early though he can't reach A and B by phone. The challenge: getting him on the road and to his destination, while filling readers in on the Tucson tragedy. Road trip? Flashbacks? I tried a dozen different t
Read more

Dress to Impress your readers! by Elizabeth Kay

By -
Image
 Every so often you come across a book where what people are wearing is described in great detail. After a while it becomes annoying as you want to get on with the story, not the author’s attempt at visually fixing a character in your head with irrelevant detail. Their mannerisms, disabilities and speech patterns may be far more effective. So if you’re going to describe someone’s clothing, it must be important. My first example is from my children’s book The Divide , set in alternative world, where the different sorts of human-like mythical beings are distinguished by the colour of their clothing. "Tansy had never been to Tiratattle before, and Ramson was pretending to be more familiar with it than one school visit could possibly have made him. He refused point-blank to ask directions, and denied outright that they’d been past the chalice stall three times. The shops were full of candles and incense burners, their designs quite unlike anything Tansy had ever seen in Geddon. There
Read more