I have some tapes left over from when I was three made by my Father.

My Dad’s the computery type. When I was young I used to sit on his knee whilst he would show me the exciting things you could do with excel (changing the colour of cell backgrounds mostly). Which was great..

He also got hold of some tapes and read me stories into them. I think the idea was that I’d master the tape machine and play them back to myself; some sort of Utopian parenting. Unfortunately the recordings captured real life which involves small-me talking and prodding the tape machine. That said, there’s a great rendition of chicken licken on them.

I’ve got hold of this archaic thing, from Maplins. It records tapes into Mp3 format via USB, which is nice because you don’t loose too much quality and the original’s pretty 1990s quality so could do with being preserved.

So I’ve now got tapes full of my Father’s story-telling voice and my small interruptions onto my laptop (apparently far before the story even started I was quite aware of Chicken Licken’s impending doom). There’s also also some unpleasant recordings from when I was seven and had learned to sing Fara Jacque out of tune which have pointedly not been digitalised.

We’ve never had a video camera, and I think this might be better.