From 1982 until the early 2000s Mum kept a daily diary. It's a journal style thing - what she did, who she visited, where she went to.

A few weeks ago I started ploughing through a couple of them looking for references to choir to help on the Music chapter of the storyline project (which was delivered the other day). In doing so I stumbled across some lovely quotes, which I tweeted. Two people suggested a ”Stuff my Mum said” twitter feed, and last week I set that up.

It’s called 30YearsAgoToday and I have used twuffer to queue up about 3 weeks worth of tweets, all from her 1982 diary. I've just selected one or two sentences from the entry, sometimes because the wording made me giggle, sometimes because it seems important or relevant or just because it feels pertinent.

I've scheduled them for around the 9pm mark as this seems to make sense for a daily update. They've been active for a couple of weeks now, and I love getting them in my timeline every day. My little bit of reflection into Mum’s life. For example, the day before my birthday is a reference to a cake that didn't go to plan, and ended up in a trifle. I remember a cake that went wrong, but I didn't know which birthday it was, or even whose birthday.

I'm finding this delightful - this bit of the storyline project is just for me, and I’m fine with that.

The Listening Project, which allows anyone to upload their own conversations, is aided by smartphones and computers with inbuilt microphones and audio software, and the ease of editing and placing sound archives online.

There are some absolutely lovely snippets of conversations recorded on The Listening Project site, some really moving stories shared in just 3 or 4 minutes of recording.

From a storyline perspective, the piece of "data" that I haven't digitised or worked with in any form yet is a C90 cassette. My neglect isn't because it's forgotten. Rather because it's remembered.

Written words, even hand written ones, are normal and ordinary and everyday. We encounter them in many forms - scribbled notes, shopping lists, birthday cards, notes. The same is true of photographs - there are photos in most rooms in my house, the faces, even of long gone family members are familiar and regularly in my eye-line.

Voices are notably different. At The Story Matthew Herbert spoke about the lack of audio recordings of our shared history, of ambient sounds. For many, many years, people would go to a photographic studio and record their images, but people rarely recorded their voices.

I have the tape in front of me. It's labelled as "Conversations" in my hand writing. On side A it says "Conversation with Gran - 26/12/98". On side B it says "Conversation with Mum & Dad - April/98". I don't know if I've ever re-listened to them, beyond, I hope, checking that it had actually been recorded. I don't think I had any form of script, or plan. I think I just made it up as I went along. I'm not even sure why I did it at the time - it was before I lost or started to lose any of them.

This is now much more significant to me, as none of these individuals has a voice I can hear anymore. Almost too much significance as I can't bring myself to listen. I'm not sure whether how much of it is because I'm worried about the emotional pull and that I'll find it upsetting and how much is because I fear disappointment, that I find it isn't audible, or isn't interesting or relevant.

One day, I'll take the plunge. Just not today!

I explained my storyline project to a few people the other week, and realised that I needed a much shorter, snappier, understandable explanation. Here's what I've got to so far:

"When Mum’s carers put her to bed for bed rest in an afternoon I'd like them to be able to choose the right thing to leave on her TV for her, the thing she’d have chosen"

Mum is entirely dependent on others to make her decisions for her. I make the financial and long-term care provision choices. The team at her home make the medical and short-medium term care choices. Her key-worker and other carers make the day-to-day small decisions. It’s these decisions that the storyline has the power to influence. And it's these that probably make the biggest difference to her. 

What I mean is that I know that if I'm somewhere where the TV is on, and it's on a channel showing a programme I'd never choose to watch, and yet the person who put it on has left the room and taken the remote control with them, I'm likely to get a bit frustrated or annoyed. I have the ability to get up and go somewhere else, or ask for the control, or do any number of other things to resolve this for myself. But Mum doesn't. Mum is at the mercy of others to choose wisely for her. So, what I want to achieve via this storyline project is to to give her carers enough background knowledge to help them make as many of these little choices in the most appropriate way possible.

For my birthday this year, one of Mum’s work friends (who I didn't really know at all, but who was kind enough to respond to my request for stories from earlier times to help fill out Mum’s storyline) kindly sent me a birthday card. 

When I opened the card I was confused that it was addressed to me as my full name, and inside the card was a small envelope. Inside that was the announcement of my birth card that Mum and Dad had sent her all those years ago. What an amazing thing to have.

This wouldn’t have happened without my storyline project, and even if nothing more ever comes of it than this, it's been worth it.

On 25th March 1933, 79 years ago today, my Grandma and Granddad got married. 

Here's my Grandma:

Here's my Grandma and Granddad:

The complete wedding party:

The cutting from the newspaper (which was sent to relatives in the US who sent it back to us a few years ago):

Fast forward 40 years, and here's a photo from their Ruby wedding anniversary, this time including my Mum and me:

This last photo is the subject of the postcard I'm planning to send to Mum later today. Without scanning and starting to organise all of these assets I wouldn't have been able to pull this post together. It reminds me, again, that doing Mum's storyline project isn't just for her benefit. I gain hugely from it too.

Do you have an object that conjures up thoughts of your family? Does your object bring memories of affection, funny moments or adventures great and small?

I stumbled across the Objects with stories page at the Barbican yesterday and lost quite a few minutes clicking on the pictures, reading the associated memories and relishing the moment.

In both sets of postcards I've had printed for my weekly dispatch to my Mum there have been pictures of objects. In the first set of postcards there was an embroidery she had done, in the second set there is a school report, an album and an ornament. All things that had relevance to her and to her life, all things that could be described and shared. I hope that the things I write on them have a similar level of fascination for her and her carers.

After the success of set 1 I decided to order a second set (there are still 5 left from the first set but I wanted to ring the changes a bit). I've used the feedback I've had from the staff to help me decide which photos to get done. These have been determined to be a success, so much so that I've filled an entire notice board over the past 6 months and Mum's keyworker is thinking up projects that she can do with them.

The photos are, column by column, top to bottom:

Far left: Mum and her Dad, Mum as bridesmaid for her friend Anne's wedding, Mum in Austria, Mum in the Yorkshire dales, Mum with her Aunt and Uncle on the beach in Scarborough

Second from left: Mum on a beach somewhere, Mum and her Mum on the beach in Bridlington, Mum's final school report

Middle: Mum's national identity card, Mum as bridesmaid for her schoolfriend Ann's wedding - this is a hand coloured photo, Mum as a little girl, Mum's "The Sound of Music" album

Second from right: Mum and her Dad, Mum and Dad at the Tall Ships festival in Newcastle, Mum

Far right: Mum and Dad in Norway, one of Mum's ornaments, Mum and the ladies in her choir, Mum with me and Gran at my friend Rachel's wedding (I was bridesmaid), Mum, Dad and her friend Anne in the lakes

Quite a few months ago, I blogged about an idea I had to create Mum's storyline to help her carers understand the lady she was before dementia took over her personality. I thought it was about time I wrote an update on what has happened since then.

As I mentioned in November the postcards were being well received, and have continued to be so. They have been commented on more than once by more than one carer. The favourites with the carers seem to be ones of Mum in her youth looking all glam'd up and of things she'd made - I sent one with a photo of an embroidery she did in her teenage years. The end result is that they are filling in gaps, and helping the carers learn more about who she was. This is good.

I've also made two more photo books for her. The one I did as a gift for her birthday is an album of photos of the first 5 years of my childhood, mostly pulled together out of a box of slides that Mum had (thankfully!) carefully annotated with dates, names and places. For her Christmas present I did a book full of photos of her wedding to my Dad, including both the official photos and the photos that friends and family had obviously taken. 

I sent letters to quite a few of her friends asking for stories and memories of time spent with her, and received letters or emails from 3 or 4 of them, 2 of which were incredibly detailed - the one from a school friend of hers was incredible and fills in a lot of gaps. I didn't find a perfect tool, and after attempting to use Scrivener decided that it was too manual, and so have mostly been using evernote which seems to be working reasonably well. It's obviously only as good as the tags I use, but by having year related tags, as well as "chapter" related tags (more in a moment on this) I seem to be able to get to the pertinent bits of information as and when I need to.

After a lot of thinking, what I decided to do with Mum's storyline was to break it down into chapters, and work on a chapter at a time, trying to have one ready for each trip to see Mum. The chapters I've decided upon so far are:

• Houses - places where she lived
• School - her school life, I have her school reports so can get into quite a lot of detail if I wish to
• Work - she worked at one company for 20 years so this might be a short chapter
• Hobbies - her interests in music, craft, reading
• People - her family, her friends
• Holidays - I have lots of photographs from various trips, some might be a bit of guesswork, but some are annotated by Mum. She travelled around quite a lot so this might be quite a lot of work
• Church - a big part of her and my Dad's life involved the local parish church, so it seems right it has it's own chapter

 A lot of these chapters are inter-related, but I don't see that as a problem, it all adds to the depth of the information that her carers can share with her.  

So, I started with the houses chapter, and am taking that up to Mum at the weekend. Next up, probably schools.