The Remembrancer
The Remembrancer was inspired by a cache of photographs lent to me by Richard Asplin, who found them discarded in a skip in Somerset. With the photographs was an envelope bearing the crest and motto Domine Dirige Nos of the city of London and the embossed words which give the book its title: The Remembrancer. Inside the envelope was an invitation to the Lord Mayor’s banquet in 1933, complete with seating plan and menu.
The photographs had been taken in India in the early 20th Century, where the photographer had clearly spent some time touring different parts of the country and visiting various British settlements there.
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Taken together with the invitation to the Lord Mayor’s banquet, I began to get a picture of the person who might have taken these photos.
In this book, I invented a character to explore themes of memory and nostalgia, transformed by the passage of time. This character has many memories and some regrets as he prepares for retirement. I wanted The Remembrancer to serve as a vehicle for me to explore ideas about the transformation of colonial history over the passage of time. Bits of it come into focus, bits of it lose focus. Our judgements about things come and go and vary in compexity over time. With The Remembrancer I had a chance to present some of this complexity.
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