Other people are much more sentimental, hanging on to things that have long since held any value except their emotional meaning.
My father was highly sentimental. He had scrapbooks of all his Italian holidays, crammed with every conceivable souvenir of the trip - postcards, train tickets, boarding passes, restaurant menus. Nothing was too trivial to be discarded.
But my attitude has always been that once something's past it's past and there's no point in developing big emotional attachments and reminiscences. I have no photos of my childhood, no scrapbooks, no shelves of souvenirs and mementos, no carefully-preserved old school uniform. I'm totally focused on the present and future rather than the past.
I suppose that makes me sound rather cold and detached, but that's the way I am. I prefer to be having new experiences rather than reliving old ones.
I do have photos of my brother in law, my sister and my niece, but that's mainly to make up for my not actually seeing them very often, since they live in southern England.
In any case all the significant events in my past - like my schooldays, my workplaces, my holidays, my various homes - are lodged vividly in my memory and easily retrievable. I don't need a scrapbook to remind me of my walks round the Venetian alleyways or the train ride through the Rocky Mountains. And if I did need a reminder, Google would soon fill in the gaps.
