Some more memories...

Last year, a friend whom I met through the knitting group I belong to, discussed with me a documentary which had been on TV. It was the 1000 journals project of Andrea Kreuzhage in which a thousand journal books were distributed and people contributed journal entries and then passed the journal on. This friend Sue, decided that she wanted to do something similar and rather than just talking about it, she has already distributed journal books to the first lot of volunteers. I was one of those people. I wondered what I could do as in the Kreuzhage project some of the pages were covered with beautiful artwork; this is not my forte :-(

Then one day when I was driving home I got an idea. I often write about my youth and I got this idea to write a journal entry about my autograph book that I had in the last 2 years of primary school. In Australia in those days (mid 1960s) an autograph book wasn't really used to collect signatures of celebrities. We tended to get schoolmates and relatives to write some traditional little verses or quotations in the book. I planned to share some of these verses in the journal. To cover up my poor drawing skills I would purchase some labels used by scrapbookers to print some of the old verses.

My old autograph book



My Grade 5 teacher used to write this quotation whenever a student asked for her autograph

Signatures of staff at my primary school



My dad wrote the entry on the top lefthand corner. My old classmate Peter wrote a clever one which just consisted of letters but if you say them, ( say YY as two Ys /too wise ) you get a message :-)

I spent a lovely half hour reading through the old book. I realised that 4 of those old classmates are still my friends albeit Facebook friends these days. I read some funny ones, I read some wise old sayings, I read some clever ones and I also read some which are no long appropriate as in 'politically correct'. When I first got the idea to use the autograph book verses I was planning to select a hotch potch of types. Then I found that there were a number of verses which reflected the status of women in those days, so I will use them as I think they will amuse the younger generation. (more of that in a later post)

Once again I'm sorry that so many photos rotated 90 degrees when they were uploaded.