We came from many disparate places that day to the cold house. It had been empty for several weeks and the damp, Lancashire air was starting to set in.

It wasn’t the most fun this get together and we had experienced much happier days there.

But it had to be done. That final sorting out, throwing away and grasping onto the memoirs of days gone by.

Although they had both done a lot of sorting out in preparation for the inevitable end they both knew was approaching quickly, there were some things that simply could not be disposed of quite so clinically.

Things they had collected from travels. Gifts given so long ago that they had no idea where they came from, yet felt they needed to acknowledge. Other items, that were so obscure that they did not know what to do with them, so they held onto them ‘for the time being’.

And the photographs, of which there were hundreds. And all were old ‘real’ pictures of many shapes and sizes, together with a few boxes of slides (that really didn’t catch on, in my eyes at least, for the faff that it needed to actually see what was on them).

Young people nowadays would look at a slide and say, ‘What!’ in exasperation about how we they things back then.

Of course many of the photographs were not new to us.

They had been bandied around over the years so that we had become familiar with them, and yet, so many of them were such that I could sort of step into them, at least in my mind’s eye.

But now, I wondered, how much was a memory of the photographs, and how many were real memories?

I would never know.

There are a few that I think of from time to time and the happiest of memories in the naivety of my childhood. Because I cannot do any differently, I cannot do any other than transpose my memories of small things onto the photographs as if they were real memories of that moment, even if they weren’t.

In today’s world of digital detritus, we have our thousands or even millions of images stored away on our hard drives or even still on the cards in our cameras. As I write this I realise that I am already behind the times, with the sales of digital cameras falling off a cliff, in the face of ever improving camera phones.

One of the photographs that sticks in my mind is of me, about 3, I suppose, standing on a track in a field, proudly wearing a think, probably woollen coat. Because the photograph is black and white, I don’t know what colour it is.

I have no memory of that photograph actually being taken, though I can imagine what I would have seen as probably my Dad took the photograph.

I can install the backdrop.

A real memory, is of water running in a very small stream, at the side of a path. It is trickling under very thin ice. I can just about hear the sound of the water as it sped away, to who knows where in the end.

It is a small, but abiding memory of my young childhood, where I wonder if the photograph of me was taken on the same day as the trickling stream that only I can see.

Not only would I like to think so, but the beauty of my own memory is that it can be. I can make it so, if I allow myself to let go of the possibility that it was not! My memory associations are my choice, and no-one else’s.

That small boy looking up at me through the photograph. What was he thinking? What was he hoping for in that moment where his thoughts would never be exposed? Were all the thoughts he was having in that moment, of the billions of thoughts he would ever have, be for nothing tangible, except for the person I have become, nearly sixty years later.

What small ideas and concerns and considerations were going through his mind that last with me to this day? What shaped his thinking so much on that cold day when I was three that make me who I am in this very moment too?

The answer has to be, all of them.

Every thought in the head of that small boy in the smart woollen coat made me who I am.