I was reading a friend's blog post about receiving the precious gift of his grandmother's recipe book, and it made me wonder whether our generation will be able to gift such a tangible and intimate legacy for our offspring, one so full of memories and meaning. How many people still keep written diaries or scrapbooks of clippings and collected ephemera? We have blogs for journalling and collecting recipes, and online galleries for our photos. Nothing one can hold in one's hands and measure the age of, or sense impressions of the person who made the entries and glued the clippings and pressed the flowers.

Despite the admitted conveniences of Flickr and Picasa I've always much prefered spending time with old albums, flicking through pages of photos with handwitten notations as to who and where and when they represent. When I was a kid I was a great scrapbooker - not in the trendy, digital sense, but I had one of those cheap, rough paper scrapbooks you could buy in any newsagent for every topic I was interested in. I had nature journals and travel journals and journals where I made lists of music and books and films. I don't do anything like that now. Blogging sporadically is about as close as I get to a journal, and I even store my recipes online.

I never really thought about how much the way we record our lives has changed until my friend wrote how touched and emotional he felt at recieving the gift of his grandmother's recipe book. Makes me think maybe I should actually use some of all these notebooks I've bought that languish untouched in drawers....