There’s hours of this.

Staring silently into the lens with saucer eyes. Inexplicable empty frames and snatches of black hedgerow and branches. Leaves and feet filmed in darkness as we trek though a landscape bursting with strange intelligence. With a significance aching to be documented.

Every little scuffle, every throwaway comment about a lost tape or thoughts behind thoughts or which path to take all eagerly and giddily recorded. Seeing the red light beaming in the darkness and feeling joy at knowing these indelible moments are being captured forever – safely stored and never to be forgotten. To be unearthed millennia later like magical religious artefacts.

And now. In the dim half-light of today, they finally spill from the sealed casket, eager to tell their secrets. To share their wonders.

But instead of the shimmering field we find hour after hour of black, unwatchable videotape. We find scuffling and distortion and snatches of inaudible conversation in languages we don’t speak anymore and we wonder how many hard drives it’ll take to store.

We wonder guiltily, if we should bother archiving it at all.

But we do - in its entirety - like faithful monks translating every syllable of an ancient text too archaic and obscure to be relevant to the faithful, but still precious somehow. Still undeniably part of something beautiful. Still an inseparable part of something very important.

And because it had meaning once.

Once, a long time ago.