Thursday 27 August 2026

Not so much “lest we forget” but because “we always do forget”

In a couple of weeks, on Thursday 11 September, we will be marking the 25th anniversary of the 9:11 attacks and the collapse of the Twin Towers. Much of the media coverage, I imagine, will be designed not to remind those who were alive when the planes went in but to inform those who have been born in the intervening quarter of a century.

Zikaron BaSalon - Remembrance in the Living Room - is a global grassroots initiative that has grown as the number of living Holocaust survivors has declined. It is an informal, largely Jewish-led, movement to ensure that the first‑hand testimonies of holocaust survivors are heard, recorded, and passed on before they die.

Small gatherings are convened, often in people’s homes, community centers, or schools, where a Holocaust survivor shares their story with a younger audience This creates an intimate, human setting for transmitting lived experience so that the memory doesn’t become abstract history but is carried forward by real people with real faces, voices and commitment. “Messengers of memory” A solemn duty is implied that those who listen should themselves carry the story forward in their own voice. Lest the rest of us forget.

Both Jewish and non‑Jewish institutions run parallel initiatives: video testimony archives, school programs, “First Person” talks, and projects where descendants or students retell a specific survivor’s story.

I am reminded of Ray Bradbury’s wonderful book Fahrenheit 451. In Bradbury’s dystopian world books are illegal. Firemen don’t extinguish fires they set fire to any remaining books that are found. The lead character in the book comes across a wandering community of vagrant intellectuals. Each has memorised an entire book (or large parts of a longer one) so the contents survive even though the physical books are gone. These people have stopped using their own names and instead identify and introduce themselves by the book they have become.

“Hello, I am The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon”

*****

There can be no learning by experience without memory and, it seems, there can be no memory without deliberate human action. We cannot rely upon our memory to remember. rather the opposite, we can be sure that our memory will forget.

I cannot remember how many times I have heard individuals or groups exclaim “Never again!” Those who survive some terrible personal tragedy, the needless death of a child for example and who, in setting up a charity to memorialise their lost loved one are inclined to say, “some good must come out of this” and “it must never happen again”. Neither of the two outcomes is possible unless we, all of us, take steps to remember.

We each need to take ownership of memory and make sure we pass on the duties that come with that ownership to another person before we too shuffle-off and are forgotten

Joe Tibbetts
The first half of Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory
27 August 2026

August 14 2026

Art imitates life and life imitates Alan Bennett.

Jim was having her hair cut yesterday when she heard one woman say to another “Yes, well….she’s bone idle…. she buys ready-baked potatoes from Marks and Spencer.”

This story reminded me of standing outside a designer outlet on a cross channel ferry shortly after UK had joined EU and the loss of Duty Free sales had forced the beastly ferry operators to think of other ways of squeezing the last pound out of their sea-sick captive customers. I was standing looking at the sea trying to stabilise the horizon by flexing first one knee then the other in the hope that in so doing I would quell the rising nausea. Two middle aged women came out of the “boutique”, which had replaced the duty free shop and which covered the best part of half an entire deck. The paused along side me to catch their breath.

“Well what do you think?” said one woman.

“I’m not sure” said her companion, “…those Kevin Kline underpants are awfully expensive.”

“I know” said the first woman, “George said that he could buy a wheelbarrow for half the price.”

*****

I was standing in line at the National Film Theatre waiting to book tickets for Kevin Brownlow’s restoration of Abel Gance’s, Napoléon which was the headline feature at the London Film Festival that year (can I really be that old) when a tall slim man in front of me requested one ticket for Frank Ripploh’s gay classic Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the lavatory) which was so explicit it had previously only been available in private film clubs

“Just the one then” said the nice young man behind the ticket counter.

“Yes! One! I suppose you can count that far, can you?” said the customer.

“Umm UmUm” said the box-office boy

“ Don’t tell me” said the tall slim customer getting into his stride, “most people are booking in parties of three”?

“Well yes” snapped the box-office attendant, with a lip-curling snarl…. “except for a party of fifteen Swedish choristers who came yesterday and demanded a discount.

Well… said the customer, see if you can squeeze me in the middle of their row

Joe Tibbetts
14 August 2026