My Quantum Leap obsession

As part of my Leap Day celebration on the 29th February, I had a Quantum Leap binge-watch, and it has rekindled my interest (not that I'd ever lost it!) in my favourite TV show of all time!

I can still remember the first moment that I watched Quantum Leap. I turned on the TV and saw a man waking up with amnesia. I thought, "this looks like just the sort of crappy made-for-tv movie I love to watch" and kept watching. It wasn't until Al appeared that I realised this was the new sci-fi show I'd seen trailers for, and from that moment I was completely hooked!

The weird thing is the air date of this was Tuesday the 13th February 1990 (30 years ago last month!). But my memory is of watching it at my parents' house, and I wasn't there on that date, I was at uni, and there's no mention in my diary of watching it. I only had a black and white portable at uni, and I don't remember watching it in black and white. I can't find a repeat listed for that episode until the second series was starting, and I definitely watched the first series!

It just so happened that 1990 was also the year that I began studying Computer Science in my second year of university, and this was when I discovered the internet! I found my way to the usenet newsgroups where people were discussing Quantum Leap, and my obsession grew over the next few years to the extent that in 1994 I probably spent more time writing absolutely dreadful fan-fiction than writing my MSc dissertation!

I collected magazine articles, and the novels, which I thought I'd got rid of but have actually found ten of in my cupboard (don't know how many there were in total). I spent a lot of time taping episodes from TV. I'm pretty sure I phoned my parents when I woke up after the night out for the end of my MSc course, to check on a recording!

When videotapes were released, I bought those, and more recently the DVDs. Since some of the music has been altered in the DVD releases, I've also had a go at converting some of my old videos taped from the TV. Some of them worked, and on some the sound has gone out of sync with the picture, which I only realised after throwing the tapes away!

I've now got hooked again, and have started watching the whole series from the beginning!

Making Memories

After Christmas I bought myself the book The Art of Making Memories by Meik Wiking. I have enjoyed Meik Wiking’s other books, and my friend Marceline had told me that she felt that she and I both create and record our memories in many of the ways recommended in the book, so I was interested to read about this subject. 

I took lots of notes from the book, then transferred them to my bullet journal (the bullet journal itself being one of the many ways that I plan memorable experiences and record them) - I took so many notes that I needed a couple of double-page spreads to write them down! I also record my memories in lots of other ways like my diary, blog, photos, moleskine sketchbook, travel journals, and collecting souvenirs. Zoom in on the pictures above to see the things I found most interesting in the book. I based my drawings on the lovely illustrations in the book.

One of my favourite concepts in the book was the idea of the hippocampus in the brain as a hippo that is a film director, and the idea of feeding that hippo by paying full attention to all aspects of the scene around us.

I love... Lego

When my brother came up to visit recently, his boxes of Lego were brought out of the garage, and I was lucky enough to be donated these old leaflets from his collection (since most of them pre-date his Lego building days so must have been mine!). My next step is to have a look through the boxes and try to build the Lego people that I remember so well!

It's interesting that the Alpine house that I used to have is very similar to the house from a set I bought a couple of years ago!

Storing and organising postcards

When I started becoming interested in collecting postcards again, I knew I needed to get them organised, and the collection had outgrown the boxes it was in. This was a good excuse to get my DVD collection organised first, and repurpose some of the DVD boxes which were a perfect size for all but the biggest postcards.

I separated the postcards into two boxes, one for places and the other for everything else. I then set about making some dividers from white card. It turned out that I needed a lot more of these dividers than I'd thought, so that I could categorise the postcards properly.

In the "places" box, I sorted the postcards into maps, Fife, Edinburgh, Lochmaben (where we used to go on holiday), the rest of Scotland, England, Wales, Italy, the rest of Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world.

In the other box, there are too many categories to list, but they include famous artists, cats, poetry, degree shows, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, film & TV, and much more! It's really difficult to decide where some postcards should go that fit more than one category!

The boxes are not full yet, so there's room to expand my collection, and I can use more of the DVD boxes when these ones do fill up.

I do still keep my Royal Mail stamp postcards in a separate box. For many years I would go down to the post office on the day these were released, and buy them. But I got rid of a lot of them eventually and just kept my favourites. Now I just buy them if I particularly like the stamps.

Buying postcards

Since I've started collecting postcards again, I've been looking at where I can buy them. It's a lot more difficult to find a good variety of new postcards. When I was young there would be postcards in most newsagents and post offices, and there was a lot of choice. Here are some of the places I've found that you can still buy postcards.

New:

Tourist attractions e.g. National Trust properties

Art galleries

Museums

Tourist information offices (the selection can be quite limited and generic, though)

Good bookshops

Quirky little gift shops

Directly from artists, whether at craft fairs or online

Secondhand:

Charity shops (Oxfam bookshops in particular tend to have a box full)

Antique or vintage shops

Flea markets

Ebay

Etsy

Postcard books

I recently discovered an amazing secondhand bookshop in Burntisland. I'd seen the sign a few times for a bookshop, but this was the first time I'd gone for a look. I was actually looking for postcards, but instead I came out with a book of Boring Postcards compiled by the photographer Martin Parr (who I just happened to see on a programme about British photography I watched shortly afterwards). This style of postcards really appeals to me, and my parents found the book fascinating too.

I've had A History of Postcards by Martin Willoughby since it came out in the 1990s. It's interesting to read about the history of how postcards developed, but most of the book concentrates on eras before the time I'm interested in, with only two pages on the 1960s and 1970s. It seems to jump from the 1930s to the 1980s with not much in between.

Boring postcards are interesting!

Some of my favourite postcards are those that could be described as "boring" but I think they're really interesting because they show an almost utopian view of mundane things like motorways, hotels, and shopping centres, with everything looking new and clean, and all the clothing and cars being lovely bright colours. It's like they are a celebration of the architecture that was modern then but can look dated now.

I suppose I should have realised that this was actually a fake view of the world! I knew there must have been some sort of filter applied to make the colours so intense, but it wasn't until I watched a programme about the history of British photography that I discovered that the colours of individual outfits and cars were painstakingly altered, making some of them more intense but completely changing the colours of others e.g. from white to red.

These days I find that most photographic tourist postcards are just a bit too slick and polished, and I feel they are tacky in their non-tackiness! So I've gone back to my roots and started picking up secondhand postcards from the 70s and 80s with their hyper-saturated colours.

Recently thrifted - Postcards

I've got back into collecting postcards in a big way over the past month or two, and a lot of the ones I've bought have been secondhand, whether from antique shops, charity shops, flea markets, Ebay, or Etsy.

Collecting postcards was one of my main hobbies when I was a child, and I used to get handfuls of them whenever I visited my grandparents, because they would get their friends to save them for me. I would also buy them wherever I went on holiday or day trips. 

Although I'd still been buying a few everywhere I went over the years, I hadn't been keeping an organised collection like I did when I was young. I remember I used to spend the occasional Sunday afternoon organising my collection, and I'm getting back into doing that.

I think one of the things that got me back into postcards was listening to the Postcards from the Past podcast. I'd been following the Twitter account for ages but when I heard the enthusiasm of the guests on the podcast for their postcards I got interested again.

My favourite postcard of all time is one with a weather-house on it by a Scottish artist called Nora Paterson which I bought in a bookshop in the 1980s. I remember looking at her various designs on the display stand and choosing that one. And now I've been able to pick up some of her other designs online!

Heriot-Watt revisited

For my birthday this year I decided to indulge in a bit of nostalgia by visiting my old university, Heriot-Watt University on the outskirts of Edinburgh. I'd only been on campus once since graduating in 1995 (that was when I finished my MSc in Human Computer Interation, just in case any of my BSc Chemistry classmates are reading this and thinking I've got my dates wrong!), and that was 15 years ago to the day, when I was there for a meal in the evening, so I didn't see much of the place that time.

Considering that I'd spent a whole year travelling all the way there from Glenrothes each day, it's bizarre that I've then spent decades thinking of it as somewhere that would take a lot of effort to visit! All I needed to do was catch the train at Markinch first thing in the morning, as I used to do, then get off the train at Haymarket after a 40 minute journey, and hop straight on a bus for another 40 minute journey.

The campus itself was my home for 3 of the years that I was at uni, so it was very strange to see how it looks now that the halls of residence and campus flats I lived in have been demolished. It really opens up the area around the loch.

I was really surprised to hear that they are thinking of demolishing what I think of as the "new" students' union building, which opened when I was in second year. Before that we would go drinking in what was known as the TU (Temporary Union), which was little more than a hut!

I really enjoyed walking round the buildings and campus, and even though I spent more than half a day there I didn't see everything I wanted, so I will definitely be going back. I loved seeing the new things, like some of the new sculptures around campus, and the places I felt particularly nostalgic about like the sunken garden and the green doors of the Computer Centre.