Auntie Pats Loft

I hear my Grandad for the first time.

My Auntie Pat is moving house and has unearthed a load of old photographs and slides that my created Grandad created throughout his life.

This is exciting sort of stuff for me because my Grandfather who was my namesake, died before I was born and although I remember seeing a few photos of him, I’ve never had any to flick through myself.

I have on quite a few occasions wondered what he was like and of course what he might have thought of me.

So it was a pleasure to hear that my cousin Simon had digitised hundreds of them and after a quick email, he sent them onto me.

It was very exciting to look through them.

There are a number of themes really including cars, travel, parties and even a bit of boxing so some similar interests perhaps – although I don’t suppose that they are particularly unique!

Anyhow, in amongst the JPGs I was amazed to find three MP3 files – copies of some listen books and short-stories that he had recorded!

It was amazing to suddenly hear the man, it was almost ghostly putting a voice to the face.

For the first time I’ve had a glimpse into my Dads Dad which is absolutely tremendous, at least for me, if not so much for you.

One of the things I’ve since found out is that he was a decent sort of writer having had two books published and written many short stories.

I reckon if he was still alive he’d absolutely have a blog somewhere and I reckon he would be buzzing to have people all over the world reading his posts.

So I have listened to the short listen recordings that I have and transcribed them here for the world to read alongside the actual listen recordings.

I wonder if he ever thought that all these people would hear him tell his tales in 2006.

Just be wary, I’ve tried to transcribe them as they were spoken – so perhaps listen and read at the same time to make better sense of some of the phrases.

I’ll be posting the stories every day this week, so keep an eye out. Any more stuff that turns up, I’ll put up here too.