Memory Memo vol. IX
2025 Revisited
This is my last post of the year. I start where, in many ways, it all started. At the grave of my father. I visit every year just before Christmas with my mother. I am home in the UK for the Christmas holidays. A break from the bubble of HBS. A moment of reflection before launching into the New Year with an ambition to start a business of my own and move to New York.
The business is called ‘Create Something Good’; a mission for my future life, as well as a reminder of whence I have come. My initials ‘CSG’ echo my father, Clifford, and my mother, Sarah. My middle name, Somerset, recalls this place, this small village where my parents were happy. Today a gravestone exists as a physical memorial. A sort of home.
Tattoos
Much like the gravestone that we visit annually, I use physical mementos to root me. Tattoos are one such memento. I etch on my skin things that are important to me, reminders of people who are significant, or items that trigger a memory. I have written about this before in a piece called Kintsugi. At the end of 2025, as I came home for Christmas, I added two new etchings on my skin from Tal, my tattoo artist.
One, ‘no me quiero ir de aqui’ recalls a summer of change, some very close friends now made, and how I can take my sense of home with me wherever I am in the world.
The other, ‘Create Something Good’, serves as a maxim for the coming decades of my life and as a physical reminder of the commitment I am now making to build a business of substance; to will it into existence whatever problems come in my way. I know the world needs our first product thragma, but on some mornings when the spirit is flagging, this little phrase on my skin helps me push on.
Memories are engraved on my arms, now, across 14 different tattoos. All filled with meaning for me, and echoes of scars, experiences, hopes, dreams, moments of joy; parts of my character.
Memory loss
As part of my research for my business, I completed a very quick online memory test. I was scared to see that the brain that used to be excellent at recalling references for quotations, EBITDA numbers from accounts, and conversations with friends is starting to degrade. I could feel my heart rate increase as I read the results. I scored below average. A sense that I could be losing part of my identity through my inability to recall, re-experience, and share the memories that make up my character pervaded me.
I have spent much of 2025 working on how to better preserve our memories and now, late in December, I realize that I myself might be in need of this solution much more than I thought. The paranoia I felt throughout the day after doing a short online test made me understand more clearly how existential memories are to our sense of self. It made me want to build faster and better in 2026 - I want thragma to exist now. I am currently using WhatsApp as a stand-in, sending pictures and voice notes to myself frantically to ensure that I don’t lose moments that matter.
Seeing our memories through the lens of the future
A family friend recently completed a bullet point list of all the memories of his life over the last 90 years, which he had subdivided into 5 year increments. His ability to recall in vivid detail moments from his youth was impressive, but noted that there was a period in the middle of his life where perhaps the monotony of routine or the busyness of life left a huge gap.
As I look back on my year, I think of the bullet points that would be conjured for my life so far. I think about the bullet points that I would like to create next year. I know I want to remember them in full, to have them for years to come, and that’s why I’m working on what I am. So the bullet points have something more behind them, I want to be aware of the beauty of life even in moments of busyness or monotony when it is all too easy to forget.
Brideshead Revisited
I have finished my year back home in Oxford, re-reading Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. I have always said it was my favorite book, but on re-reading, I am struck that it too revolves around the theme of memory.
Sebastian Flyte, in the famous scene of strawberries, Sauternes, and Turkish tobacco smoke on a glorious Oxford summer afternoon, says something that resonates even more deeply in my current context.
“I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, could come back and dig it up and remember.”
The book is filled with moments that return us through the frame of the narrator, Charles Ryder, to memories of his past, often connected by sounds, smells, places, or things. It is a glorious ode to the power of memory to help us understand ourselves, re-live our pasts, and reframe our futures.
“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time [...] These memories, which are my life - for we possess nothing certainly except the past - were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere”.
Charles, as an architectural painter, is witness to the memory of a family, of a bygone era, always an outsider, but one with a purpose to capture a series of moments in time that will soon be lost to history, to the destruction of WWII. As I re-read the book and 2025 draws to a close I notice how often architectural metaphors are used by Evelyn Waugh to capture the sense of the role of memory, like stones in our landscape.
2025 has been a year full of memories, of moments of significant change. I echo the statement of Julia in the book:
“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”
2026 will, I hope, be a great year for me.
But as I revisit 2025, I hold onto the architectural metaphor of every stone in this house of mine holding a memory.
My bullet point list from the past year is full of moments of joy, sadness, growth, change, difference, and comforting consistency. I hope when I look back on 2026, each of these bullet points will be richer, deeper, and full of context with the help of thragma.
Happy New Year when it comes: may it be one overflowing with memories, never to be forgotten.