3 A tale about a long-forgotten camcorder (C2)

This is a story about a long-forgotten Canon digital video camcorder and a particular lesson I learned through it. The camcorder was originally purchased in 2004 by my brother and given as a gift to my parents that year. Until 2012, they used it extensively. Then, almost overnight, it became redundant as cheaper smartphones became capable of capturing video footage that was of considerably better quality than the grainy Mini Digital Video (Mini DV) cassettes used in the camcorders of the early 2000s. The camcorder, its peripherals and the cassettes containing all the home videos that my parents had ever shot, were packed away in a box by my father and forgotten about for the next thirteen years.

For reasons which will shortly become clear, that piece of outdated tech has come to represent something monumental in my life. If I had to summarise in one sentence what it has taught me, it is this: the moments that seem so inconsequential at the time often turn out to be the most precious of all, but the duties that seem so important at the time often turn out not to matter at all.

The story begins in early 2025. My parents had sold their house in Torquay and needed to pack up their belongings in order to move to a much smaller, and more manageable, bungalow. They were on a tight timescale; everything had to be moved out of the old house and into the bungalow by a particular date in July 2025. My parents were both in their late seventies. The house they were leaving was enormous; the building had historically been part of a Victorian school that had – many years previously – been converted into three sizeable terraced houses. My parents’ house, High Grove Lodge, was the end terrace, with four bedrooms and three reception rooms. In their own inimitable way, both my parents were hoarders and, having lived at the house since 1979, had managed to accumulate an impressive volume of stuff.

Knowing how difficult it would be for them to downsize after forty-four years, and pack up only the essential belongings for the new house, my wife and I started going over after work to help them get their heads around the many decisions they needed to make about what to take and what to discard or pass on. Observing that process – the psychological realities of downsizing – provided me with one of the most extraordinary and poignant experiences of my life, but it is not the focus of today’s story. Right now, I want to focus on a nagging sense of urgency that began to plague me about a week before the move. At that stage, most of the rooms upstairs were largely empty and two of the downstairs reception rooms were full of packing boxes, stacked one on top of the other. As I moved from task to task, emptying cupboards, wardrobes and drawers, I couldn’t shake this unrelenting feeling that something very important had been overlooked. There had been one or two situations in which we had been close to accidentally throwing away objects of very great personal or monetary value and I felt I needed to be extra cautious not to rush the final stages of the packing, despite the fact that the deadline was looming on the horizon like an unstoppable freight train.

Have you ever been in a situation where something undefinable is bothering you endlessly but, try as you might, it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly what it is? I had this sense that something important hadn’t yet been unearthed and packed, but I could not imagine what it might be. It was distracting and irritating in equal measures. I got on with clearing the house and tried to shelve the mounting frustration.

Then, the day before the actual move, the penny dropped. I was upstairs in my parents’ bedroom. It was empty except for the bed and two wardrobes: one containing my mother’s daily clothes, and the other, my father’s. I hadn’t looked inside them because they’d needed the clothes right up to the end. Now, however, we were at the stage where time was of the essence so we were simply emptying the contents of drawers and cupboards into boxes. When I opened Dad’s wardrobe, my heart sank: it was absolutely full to bursting. And not just with clothes; there were papers, books, sports equipment, stationery and much more besides. This wasn’t going to be a quick job. After moving his clothes onto the bed, I took the other items out one by one and tried to organise them into piles of more or less similar groups of things on the bedroom floor. As I was getting close to the back of the wardrobe I reached deep inside and my hand felt the outline of a cardboard box about the size of a loudspeaker. I lifted it out carefully. It was the dog-eared box for the Canon digital camcorder that my brother had bought my parents twenty-one years previously. It was heavy. I opened it carefully to discover that not only did it contain the original camera and peripherals but also about eighteen Mini DV cassettes, all labelled and dated in my father’s spidery handwriting.

Now, as I went through the cassettes, I realised that none of them had ever been watched by anyone. Consider that for a moment. From 2004 to 2012, my parents had shot about eighteen hours of footage before packing it all away and forgetting about it for thirteen years. I really don’t mean to be critical of them, but there was something about the way they did life that affected their motivation to face, and deal with, technical tasks. If there was a certain amount of friction involved in solving a technical issue, they simply left it unsolved. That’s not to say that they didn’t care about the camcorder and the tapes; it’s just that their lives were so completely focused on loving, supporting, and providing for their family and the people in our church community, that transferring the footage from the Mini DV cassettes to DVDs or to a hard drive just got put on the back burner. I could see immediately, from the contents of the box, that they had never transferred or even watched the home movies because the peripherals that enabled plugging the camera into a TV had never been opened. Not only that, but there was also an unopened FireWire CardBus adapter, a technological relic from a bygone era that would have enabled high-speed transfer from the camera to a PC. Transferring the footage to DVD or a hard drive would have become one of many projects that I’m sure my dad intended to tackle at some later date but, in the grand scheme of things, it was not urgent. Life just happened, as it does, and that task fell down the list of priorities until it simply disappeared off the bottom of the list, in the same way that the camcorder box physically disappeared, buried behind lots of other things at the back of his wardrobe. Out of sight, out of mind.

As I sat there on the bedroom floor with the open box, I realised that this was it. This was the thing that had been needling me. Somewhere, deep in my subconscious mind, I had fuzzy memories of my parents filming us all at the zoo or the beach and I’d known that this video record of eight years of life was preserved somewhere. I had in my hands possibly the most precious thing from the house and I’d found it the day before the move. I carefully packed the camera, the cassettes and the peripherals back into the box and carried it out to the car. I didn’t even mention it to my parents. And here’s the absolute kicker: my parents had clearly completely forgotten that it had ever existed. At no point during the packing for the move did they ask, ‘Now, where on earth are those precious home videos?’ or, ‘We can’t leave until we find that camcorder’. Allow me to play devil’s advocate for a moment. Imagine that I had chosen to throw away the box along with the many items of hoarded junk. I honestly don’t believe that my parents would ever have noticed or even remembered that they’d owned a camcorder.

Well, the move happened and Mum and Dad settled into their new home on a hill at the far side of town. There were so many exciting and positive things for them to experience at the bungalow that they quickly forgot about the pain and frustration of downsizing and moving house. Sometimes, in the months that followed, I wondered if they might ask about what had happened to that camcorder, but they never did.

I would like to say that I set about transferring the Mini DV cassettes to MP4 files immediately, but I did not. Can you guess what happened? That task dropped down my list of priorities, but instead of falling off the bottom of the list it stayed there stubbornly. For one thing, the camcorder box was visible to me on a daily basis, as it was stored on a shelf next to my computer. For another, I had a strong sense of prescience that if I didn’t do something about it soon, my parents might not live to see the footage and remember those events from the past. I had good reason for thinking this way. My Finnish father-in-law Martti had, over many years, shot home videos on VHS cassettes that were only digitised when he was already suffering from frontal temporal lobe dementia, to the extent that he was unable to recognise, remember or enjoy the footage.

It wasn’t until nearly a year later, in May 2026, that I finally plugged the camcorder into my laptop to digitise the first Mini DV cassette. It’s hard for me to describe the emotions I felt as I heard the unmistakable and evocative sound of the camcorder motor whining like a mosquito and saw the shaky picture, complete with interlacing artefacts and digital combing that were so reminiscent of early DV camera footage.

The first scene of that first tape had been shot by my parents in the summer of 2004. They were in the garden of the old Victorian terraced house, High Grove Lodge, filming my one-year-old son, Joel, in the swing and in the paddling pool on 31st July. It was a hot, hazy day and the garden was verdant and full of beautiful flowers. Watching it instantly catapulted me back twenty-two years into the past. It wasn’t so much the setting of the garden that hit me; it was the voices of my parents, the words they used and the way that they addressed each other. We humans have a remarkably finely-tuned ear that can discern even the slightest changes in tone and quality of a person’s voice. It was intensely emotional to hear the youthfulness in my parents’ voices and speech. Mum was giving a rambling commentary about how happy she was to have this new video camera and how novel and practical it was, which all sounds laughable now when considering that absolutely anyone can instantly capture 4K broadcast-quality images at the touch of a button on their smartphone.

Perhaps part of the reason that I hadn’t got round to digitising the footage until nearly a year after the move was that the only way to do so was to connect the camcorder, via a USB video grabber, to a laptop and then actually play the footage on the camcorder in real time in order for it to be captured. I knew that would be a laborious and time-consuming endeavour. I also wrongly assumed that it would be boring. Oh, how wrong I was. In fact, I was so deeply affected by the footage that I immediately stopped every other nonessential activity so that I could binge watch the movies back to back on my laptop screen as they were being transferred to the hard drive. Pretty soon, my wife Sue joined me and we spent several hours over a weekend sitting in the office with a glass of wine transfixed by the footage.

I say ‘transfixed’, which is a pretty strong adjective, but it is most apt in this context. Without a shadow of a doubt, the power of the images was intensified by the knowledge that they had never been viewed previously. It was like unearthing a secret treasure trove. There were, in fact, so many precious things to be gleaned from the footage that it is hard to know where to begin or how to express them. I shall try.

First, there was the fact that the footage contained no artifice whatsoever. This word ‘artifice’ gives us the word ‘artificial’ and it perfectly sums up the nature of so many of the videos we see online now. Because it is so easy to film, edit and manipulate images, and because AI and smart filters can completely trick the eye and the ear, we have become jaded about what we see because we know that, potentially, none of it is real. It is characterised by artifice. But there in the footage from the camcorder, everything was refreshingly real. There was no artifice in it. My parents simply picked up the camera and started shooting just because they felt compelled, by a moment of beauty, to do so.

Then, there was the fact that the footage was often unhurried and repetitive. These days, of course, our understanding of what constitutes interesting viewing has been more or less hijacked by short form video reels that vie with each other aggressively for our attention, assaulting our senses and emotions to elicit the deepest possible sense of outrage, shock or excitement. I can easily allow two hours to slip by as I consume countless confusing or deeply triggering contexts that addle my brain and often leave me feeling discombobulated, stressed or even broken. Not so with the camcorder footage. Take the garden video for example. There are several minutes of my mother feeding my son Joel, who is sitting in the swing under the apple tree, while my father films and provides a corny narrative to accompany the proceedings. It’s utterly simple and devoid of any agenda other than to enjoy the fact that the technology has made it possible to capture that moment. There’s something quite touching about the fact that my parents are genuinely amazed to have a video camera that they can hold in their hand and switch on quickly. Gen Xers will remember that, before the millennium, video cameras were designed to record onto huge VHS cassettes and were so heavy and cumbersome that they had to be rested on one’s shoulder while footage was being filmed. Not only that, but they were also staggeringly expensive. Only the very dedicated, such as my father-in-law Martti, had the tenacity to bring them out again and again at family events and go through the rigmarole of setting them up to film.

Even though the content my parents shot is sometimes eye-rollingly dull, there’s still something rather thought-provoking about the targets they chose to point the camera at. One of the cassettes contains about thirty unbroken minutes of a Breton dance show, shot in a rainy village square in northern France. And while the footage itself really is of no particular interest from the perspective of family reminiscence, it’s still eminently worth watching because it provokes reflection about why exactly my mother thought that anyone in the future would be even remotely interested in complete strangers dancing awkwardly, slightly out of focus, across a village square. Dull as it was on the surface, I sat watching it, with a glass of pinot blanc in my hand, reflecting on the fact that, those days were so untainted by the attention economy that my parents actually thought that filming an obscure Breton dance, or the facade of a stately home, or a motorboat out in the bay, would be at least as interesting as footage of the children when they were toddlers. The reason that they thought these things would be interesting was that, at that time, most people who owned a camcorder had virtually no experience of consuming video on demand, so they were totally ignorant of what was to come and they had nothing to compare their footage to.

I have to say that I sat through all thirty minutes of the Breton dance show, trying to understand emotions that I couldn’t easily label or articulate. Now, however, I can see that this dull and otherwise unrelatable footage reawakened in me a strong memory of the fact that, twenty years ago, people still believed that it was worth preserving low-quality images that nobody would ever bother filming nowadays, because they felt a sense of duty and responsibility to use the new technology they had to document and preserve anything that could be considered remotely interesting for future generations. The sense of innocence about the perceived value of this footage was powerfully transmitted through the eagerness of my parents to continue doggedly pointing the camera at the same boring target and it caused me to remember, perhaps in a way that nothing else has done in the past two decades, that – not that long ago – things happened at a considerably calmer pace; at the kind of pace where it would be quite conceivable to imagine sitting down to watch thirty minutes of Breton dancing in the rain, shot on a dodgy camcorder.

Another historical reality that transfixed and fascinated me was people’s willingness to be filmed. That alone added a lot of interest to the content because it was such a powerful reminder of life before people gave any thought to who might see the footage. Watching back I could see, in the way that people in shot moved and spoke, that they did not believe the captured images would ever be seen by more than a few family members. Because social media did not exist in the early 2000s it did not occur to those being filmed that there would shortly come a time when anyone could immediately broadcast anything they filmed to an audience of the entire world. Therefore, people behaved differently. It was immensely important for me to see how relaxed and unbothered people were in front of the camera, if only because it was a poignant reminder that there was once a time when people were not triggered by seeing a camera, or primarily concerned about their privacy. Now, I am not saying it was necessarily a good thing that people were happy to be filmed; I’m merely saying that people’s attitudes changed very quickly.

The next thought-provoking thing that I noted is that, in the content shot between 2004 and 2012, there were no mobile phones in shot. I know it’s a cliché to go on about this nowadays, but I felt an aching sense of longing to be back in that reality and experience it again with the knowledge I have now. The iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy 2 were both available when my parents were recording the last bits of content in 2011 and 2012 but there isn’t a single shot in which anyone was looking at a screen. Not one.

At the beginning of this muse, I said that if I had to summarise, in one sentence, what finding the camcorder taught me, it was that the moments that seem so inconsequential at the time often turn out to be the most precious of all, but the duties that seem so important at the time often turn out not to matter at all. Those inconsequential, refreshingly real, unhurried, sometimes dull snapshots of life in the early 2000s, when people were not bothered about being filmed or distracted by a mobile phone, were, in fact, far more precious than any of the family members in the footage could have imagined at the time.

It is with a little trepidation and sadness that I come to the last observation I feel I need to make about the home videos shot on this long-forgotten camcorder. It relates to the duties that seemed so important at the time, but often turned out not to matter at all. As I have said, the footage is the footage: a true and veracious reflection of what the people in the shot did and said, with no editing, no manipulation and no further curation. As such, it can be remarkably unforgiving. If you ever have the opportunity, over a weekend, to watch about eighteen hours of unedited video footage filmed by your immediate family over a period of eight years, from a time in your life that you can barely remember, certain unavoidable and undeniable things will jump out at you. And not necessarily things that are easy to accept.

Let me give you an example of this. On the occasion of my son Joel’s first birthday a number of family members were gathered in the dining room of my parents’ house. My mother was videoing the proceedings. Joel had opened some of his presents and was crawling on the floor playing with the opened gifts that were strewn about the place. The conversation between the adults continued around him. Every now and then, Joel crawled over to one of the adults and reached out with his tiny arms for them to pick him up and hold him, which they duly did. As I watched, I kept hoping and thinking, ‘When will he crawl towards me and reach out to me?’ The scene continued for a while with the buffet and the tea, and then it happened – Joel approached me and reached out to me. I did pick him up but then almost immediately passed him to someone else, without really acknowledging him at all. I know it was just a moment captured on a Mini DV cassette that might never have been found or watched, but it reflected to me that, at that moment, I had not been in the least bit interested. This was an uncomfortable reality that was a feature of several scenes across several years: in the moments caught on film, I was not nearly as interested in the children as I subsequently believed I had been. Human memory is not a reliable metric and can be terribly self-serving, but the camera is an objective metric. Certain unavoidable and undeniable things jumped out at me.

Now, I’d like to look at the ‘duties that seemed important at the time but turned out not to matter’. The footage from 2004 to 2012 showed an indisputable trend of what was happening behind the scenes over the course of those eight years. This trend was evident in what the home videos showed by omission. What I mean by this is that the footage revealed a painful truth not by what was captured on film, but by what was completely missing from it. Allow me to explain. In the first videos in 2004 and early 2005 I was working from home as a freelance translator. I appeared regularly in the videos and was clearly physically present, even if I didn’t hold my children tight and hug them as much as I would certainly do now if I could be transported back in time to those moments. However, from September 2005 I am undeniably absent. There is tape after tape of the children with my wife Sue and my parents, but I am seldom there. Whenever I started watching a scene from which I was absent, my first thought was, ‘Where am I? Am I there but out of shot?’ Then I realised that I wasn’t there because I was most likely doing something that I considered ‘more important’ than spending time with the children. The painfully unavoidable truth is that, from September 2005 onwards, the ‘more important’ thing was teacher training and then working as a teacher. Now that’s all well and good, but most of the videos were shot outside school hours, or at the weekends. So, of course, that set me thinking about what I might have been doing at those times.

A particular memory crystallised in my mind. It was from September 2005 when my youngest son was about to be born. I was starting my first teaching placement at a secondary school in South Devon and I approached the head of the teacher training course to ask if I could take a week of paternity leave, which was my legal right as a new parent. Now, I am paraphrasing here because I can’t remember her exact words, but the lady who was in charge of the course essentially said that although she couldn’t stop me from taking that week to be with my wife and newborn son, it would be ‘catastrophic’ in terms of my training because I would be missing the opportunity to ‘build a strong connection’ with the classes that I would be helping to teach at the start of the autumn term. And, can you guess what I decided? Out of fear that taking paternity leave would jeopardise my training and negatively affect the way I was seen by the course head, I did not take that week of paternity leave. Rather than building a strong connection with my son, I built a strong connection with students whose names I no longer remember in order to please a teacher trainer who died many years ago.

The phrasal verb ‘to turn out to be’ communicates an element of surprise or revelation. If I say that something ‘turned out not to matter’, I am saying, in the simplest terms, that the ultimate, demonstrable reality was that it did not matter, or that the final status of the situation was that it was unimportant, quite regardless of what people had thought, said or done previously. If something ‘turned out not to matter’ irrefutably, objectively and empirically it did not matter. The video footage from the camcorder, as it turned out, was as much a revelation about the times I wasn’t there as about the times when I was. The paternity leave incident turned out to be a precedent for the following years, when the ‘more important’ things were lesson preparation, planning and marking, in the evenings and at the weekends.

It is painful to see home videos of the family, wonder where I was, realise that I had chosen to prioritise work and then feel a delayed sense of sorrow about that decision. But I don’t want to finish on a low note. I may be sentimental, but I am also pragmatic. Watching the carefree footage of the moments that seemed so inconsequential at the time has helped me to understand that there could be some very precious moments around any corner and that it is up to me to recognise them when they arrive and enjoy them to the full. By the same token, I think about the times when I wasn’t in the films because I was fulfilling some duty that seemed ‘so important’ to me back then. Now, I recognise and accept that the sense of obligation I felt was often more a question of misplaced loyalty to my work than of any real external expectations being placed on me. Knowing this, I have made a number of life decisions that have, thankfully, taken me far away from the destructive thinking patterns that led me to choose things that turned out not to matter at all in the long run. Nevertheless, I am incredibly grateful and thankful that I reached into my father’s cupboard and laid my hand on the camcorder box because doing so has led me to see, even through the unforgiving footage of my absenteeism, that I am moving in the right direction now and I am considerably more boundaried than I used to be. Misplaced loyalty is largely a thing of the past and the children have shown through their contact and comments that they love and value the family.

So, the Mini DVs have all been digitised and saved, in date order, ready to be transferred to a USB that will plug in to my parents’ TV so that they can watch those forgotten scenes whenever they want. I still haven’t told them anything about the camcorder and they still haven’t mentioned it. I genuinely can’t wait to see their reaction when they watch the footage for the first time. I’m so excited about revealing it to them that I can barely contain myself. I badly want to know how they will relate to it, what memories it will evoke and whether it will give them the same kinds of extraordinary revelation that it has given me. We shall see.