Sometimes small insignificant objects have an important legacy.
I bought this radio second hand recently. I wasn’t looking for it, but I saw someone selling it online for a few euros and it instantly brought back memories.
It’s an old, probably late 70s, AM/FM radio the size of your hand. It doesn’t do much. This one still works, it makes noises, the batteries are even ok, though the previous owner butchered the flap changing them.
The significance is that we used to have one when I was a kid. It would sit in the kitchen above the microwave because it was small enough to fit below the shelf above it.
Every morning, my parents would wake up at about 06:30am before my sister and I, have their breakfast, and get ready for work. As soon as they got to the kitchen, they’d switch on the radio to listen to the news. France Inter long wave. There wasn’t much choice at the time: FM was still illegal in France, and the only radio stations were France Inter, RMC, and Radio Luxembourg, the later 2 broadcasting semi legally to France from abroad.
I’d get up about 30 minutes after them, and go to the kitchen to have my own breakfast. The radio would still be on and I’d listen to the news at 07:00am (and to Philippe Mayer’s 5 minutes humorous daily show just before the news).
When we went on holiday in the summer (French tradition), we’d take that radio with us. In some cases, when there was no TV in the rental house we had, it would be our only source of external entertainment for a month. But even when we had a TV, we wouldn’t watch it at breakfast time or even at meal times. We’d listen to the radio.
I posted the photo I took above to the family group chat and my father instantly recognised it. Even my sister, younger than me and not listening to the news at the time, remembered it.
Today it’s pretty useless unless the zombie apocalypse happens: long wave is pretty much dead, FM is a mess and in mono on a tiny speaker not great. So it has usage value zero. But it has a nostalgia value that only my family can appreciate.
#Photography #Personal