Blast from the Past!

It is funny what a simple reminder from the past can do to conjure up memories.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from an ex work colleague from the 1980's/1990's telling me his daughter had found in an old box in storage a video tape labelled, caution X-rated film- with my name on the label. Naturally she was curious about it's content.
The e- mail was copied to the POKS group which was an acronym for Pride of Kent Society - a loose association of colleagues and ex colleagues derived from the days we all worked in West London and a local pub was called The Kent, and they served Fullers London Pride beer, which we imbibed sometimes.

The video in question was from an outward bound team building week in Betwys Y Coed in Wales  in the late 1980's and as part of the team building we carried out certain tasks one of which was to make a video. We were given two expensive video tape cameras, of the over the shoulder size, and no instructions, so we had to figure out how they worked as well as make a film.
The problem was that if you stopped the recording and then started again, the camera re- wound the tape a fraction and the last part of the previous shot was lost. One of our scenes involved a dramatic rescue from the river but the pesky camera kept cutting off part of the shot. One of the team had to plunge in to the river 6 times before we got a good shot of the rescue.

As it was March the river was very cold, so once on the dry land he stripped off all his clothes ( he was a bit of an exhibitionist) and this was caught on film- so it was kept on the video.

This video when complete was circulated around the team for them to take home to show the family/partners etc when we returned, and I was the guardian of the tape- as it turned out is stayed in one place since then and as we all went different ways it was forgotten about.

Of course these days the video presents a problem, many of us will have gone to DVD or Blue Ray players and probably got rid of the video tape equipment - so one of the team will get it transferred hopefully- it will be strange to see what we were like about 20+ years ago.

We did all sorts of things that were given as challenges, some by the course leaders and some as individuals challenges within the team set by the teams themselves. Such as  bursting in on the local village school and taking over a class ( the teacher was very flexible and let us do it -  would we get arrested these days?) and a story reading session ensued.

One night we had to sleep on the top of Moel Shabod, a small mountain, in just survival bags, no tents, and were woken up by a herd of sheep that were a bit annoyed that we were on their grazing patch- this was before dawn, so we had the lovely view as we came down off the mountain of the sun rising and driving off the mist in the valley, as we walked down for a great and welcome cooked breakfast.

It was a very memorable week in many ways.