- Emotional Stress
- Workplace surveillance
- Headaches and nausea
- Vanity
- Long distance parenting/ always on/never alone
- Knock-backs
I have a friend who was obsessed with the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. I suppose we all were, growing up in the 80s. But this friend lived with her family in Abu Dhabi as a child and so she had a pirated video of the film, a real rarity at the time. She decided to test the new audio tape recorder she’d been given for her birthday by taping the film, straight off the TV.
That night her Mum and Dad had a colossal fight and the next morning her Mum packed what she could and took off, with my friend and her sister, getting a flight straight back home to Scotland.
Turned out it was the end of her parents’ marriage and she didn’t see her Dad again for over 20 years. So she had a recording of that terrible, final argument on tape, over a background of Indiana Jones.
She never once listened to it and then one day she realised that she had lost it.
While looking through my studio bin, I found an old newspaper from the 80s, and in it this story:
There was this couple, who worked in the microelectronics industry, and their relationship was, described euphemistically by the journalist in the terminology of the day, ‘stormy’. After yet another fight in the pub, the woman threw a videotape at her boyfriend and left. A week later she killed herself. Only then did the boyfriend think to watch the tape. It was a video apology for her behaviour. But in it she said that if he didn’t care enough to watch the tape within the week she would know that she had ruined everything and life just wouldn’t be worth living.’
With no conscious purpose in mind, I saved the article.
