I made a gift for you 💝
Summer memories (and funnel frustrations)
Hello friends,
I can barely believe that today is the last day of August. Summer is heading into its final act, but there’s still just a little more time to wring the last few drops of enjoyment out of it yet.
I’m writing this to you from the sun-dappled living room in my mother-in-law’s house in Dorset, stealing a moment to write while she’s beavering away in the kitchen and my partner and brother-in-law have taken the kids to the park. I can hear birds singing over the distant hum of traffic and can see a wall of thick, green leaves atop a bank of statuesque trees swaying in the wind, just beyond the window.
It’s a small, ordinary moment - but one I still want to notice and be grateful for and to tuck away in the memory bank for savouring again later.
Memory has been very much on my mind these past few weeks, as my little girl approaches the end of her pre-school days and we’re only a few weeks away from applying for secondary school for my son. Here’s a note I posted a couple of days ago which captures my wistful mood pretty well…
But memories can also be so fragile. I promised my son that I’d take him to Fishbourne Roman Palace near Chichester over the holidays and we finally made it there this week.
It was brilliant. The preserved mosaics are spectacular and I always feel a real, grounded sense of perspective at historic sites like this, where life was vigorously experienced hundreds, if not thousands of years ago - of what Shakespeare calls the ‘brief candle’ of life1.
For the whole day, I wondered at the mosaics, the (brilliantly stuck-in-the-1960s) museum exhibits, the formal garden planted in original Roman style - drinking it all in with fresh eyes. Or at least so I thought.
Only when we got home, my other half told me that he and I had visited there when we first moved down to Brighton, well over a decade ago now. He even showed me the fridge magnet we bought while we were there.
I have absolutely no recollection of this.
There’s probably no particularly grand lesson to take from this other than that I’ve got a terrible memory! But it did make me smile for a more specific reason - which is that I’ve spent the past week or so hard at work on creating something all about capturing memories just like this one (and something I clearly could have done with back in 2011 or 2012 when I last went to Fishbourne!)
So, drumroll ladies & gentleman….
May I present to you my very special SUMMER MEMORIES KEEPSAKE WORKBOOK for 2024.
It’s a PDF you can print out to record the sights, sounds, people, places and general vibes that made this summer what it was for you. My hope is that filling it out will be a fun and mindful way to look back over the season as it comes to an end, as well as something you can keep to look back on in summers yet to come, so that those precious moments don’t just slip away into the oblivion of forgetting.
You can get it here:
And now, a confession…
If you’ve been here a while, you’ll have heard me talk about the new life stories business I’m developing as an entrepreneurial side venture to my documentary film work. And as fun as it genuinely has been to make this workbook, my underlying motive was to offer this as a lead magnet2 to help introduce people to me and my forthcoming life story offerings.
The very first step on my road to worldwide business domination if you will (er, maybe not, but you get my drift anyway).
And so having done the fun part of actually making the workbook, I set about following the instructions on the brilliant female-led tech platform I’ve been signed up to now for almost a year3 without having actually done anything on it (whoops).
I set up my opt-in page so people can sign up to download the workbook as a freebie and set up my email automation to deliver it along with some more info about me and my business ideas.
Flush with pride in these very modest achievements, my plan was to ask you kind people to test this ‘funnel’ out for me. But…. I had an epic tech fail.
At the final hour, I realised that I’d failed to connect any email service to said tech platform. So although the automation was all set up, no emails were actually being delivered as there was no email service available to do that (double whoops).
So I headed back to the instructional videos and entered the confusing world of DNS records and domain verification.
For a brief heady moment last night, I thought I was all set. But then this morning I discovered that these DNS records need at least 48 hours to update and then I need to wait at least another 48 hours for the email service to ‘warm up’ (I feel like someone who inadvertently stumbled into a bread baking class and then learnt about how yeast works for the first time…)
All of which is to say, the funnel isn’t funnelling. Or at least not yet.
But I really wanted to share the workbook with you now. So I decided not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good and just include it directly in this post for you today.
I really hope you enjoy it. And at least now I know the process for the next fun freebie I cook up eh. Hashtag always learning etc!
Well that’s all my main business out the way for today. But before I go I just wanted to share a couple of other lovely Substack pieces I’ve seen that speak to these lazy, hazy days of late summer and the value of catching hold of a fleeting summer moment before it’s gone forever. I loved reading both of these and I’m sure you will too.
Next week it’s back to school and I’ll be resuming my weekly meandering updates from work & life. I’ll also be getting going with the first post in my ‘A-Z of Favourite Documentary Films’ - here’s the master post for that if you missed it.
My favourite documentary films - an A-Z
Note: if you just want to skip to the films without reading the full preamble as to why & how I’m doing this project, feel free to scroll straight on down to the full list at the end of the post 🎞
So plenty to be getting on with. I’m planning to open a chat thread on Substack for us all to share some of our own top memories from this summer, but of course I’d love to hear from you in the comments here too.
Have you ever completely forgotten visiting somewhere?
What’s your worst tech fail (come on folks, make me feel better 😄)
What did you think of the workbook??
Sending you oodles of sunshiny, summery wishes. And also - something I should probably have done at the start of this post - a disclaimer that I know this is all very northern-hemisphere-centric, so apologies to my friends south of the equator. I see you. And I will have more nice things to share coming your way soon I promise.
With much love as always,
Vicki x
Proudly taking part in the Sparkle on Substack 24 essays club – this is post number 19.
Watch my film on Netflix (in Europe) or Vimeo (everywhere else) - or see trailer, reviews & bonus content HERE
Life stories website – coming soon...
In Macbeth’s speech, there’s a definite sense of nihilism in his talk of life being ‘but a walking shadow, a poor player’, but I personally find a kind of comfort in thinking about how brief our current slice of history is when you zoom out to such large timescales
My son saw this phrase and thought ‘lead’ was pronounced like the metal and now I can’t hear it any other way 😄
FEA Create from the Female Entrepreneurs Association if you’re interested
Thanks for sharing your memory catcher! I’ve most certainly forgotten things/places (or at least go through years without thinking of particular things). I know this because not infrequently I read an old journal and it’s new to me again.
Glad you're having a good end to the summer, Vicki, and good luck with the start/re-start of school. What a milestone. I've downloaded the summer keepsake, thank you, and will take a look later. Currently hosting the family (all of them!), so a chaotic and joyous summer weekend before the children/grandchildren head off again.