It’s a small world
One evening during the summer, I went into a restaurant in Bishkek to meet a group of tourists who had just arrived. I was somewhat taken aback because I was greeted by a somewhat unusual question:
“Does the name Ashmole mean anything to you?”
Now, most tourists ask question about Kyrgyzstan, the mountains, the nomadic lifestyle … or maybe something more personal like how long I have been in Kyrgyzstan and what brought me here. But a question about Ashmole … it stopped me dead …
The teacher in me was tempted to break into a lecture:
Elias Ashmole … seventeenth century … royalist … born in Litchfield … friend to the son of the local squire who sponsored him as a student at Oxford University … became a solicitor … and later a customs official at Worcester … a Freemason, (his diary gives us one of the earliest references to the Masons in England) … antiquarian and collector … founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford … landowner in Berkshire and East Barnet, Hertfordshire … owned a mansion called Belmont in what is now Cockfosters … has two schools named after him
Instead I flustered … and uttered something like “Should it?”
It seems that the tourist had been an old boy of Ashmole School in East Barnet – where I had taught for some seventeen years before coming to Kyrgyzstan. He had done an internet search and found that I had been a teacher at the school – hence the question.
We swapped a few stories but as he had left school before I started teaching there … there were only a few people that we knew in common … but it was a point of contact.
We commented to each other: “Isn’t it a small world“.
Every year, I would conduct a school Assembly based on the biography of Elias Ashmole … There was a large portrait of him hanging at the back of the school hall and I always started by asking if anyone could guess who it was. Some of the answers were quite surprising …
Anyway, apparently some people still remember those assemblies and, recently, I even received a request from someone asking me for some information for an essay they had to write.
I also used to do one on the symbolism of the school badge: the staff of Mercury with it’s entwined serpents and the fleur de lys …
Every now and again I get a bolt from the blue … a message from someone asking a question like “Are you the Ian Claytor that used to teach at Ashmole School?”
When I ask them how they found me, it usually turns out that they were googling something else and my name just happened to crop up and they followed the links, eventually finding an email address … and decided to follow it up.
It’s nice to get these messages … They always starts the memories flooding back. I am pleased to say that, so far, I have always been able to remember the individuals who write to me … but not always all of the other people they mention in their messages.
It might help if I could find a photograph of them … but as I don’t have that many I am left relying on my memory. It is one of the things I regret, that when I came here I only brought a few photographs with me.
I no longer have the albums … and albums … and albums that I had accumulated over the years. Photographs of family and friends, places I have visited, school, university, School trips, … If I had had them then I could get them out and go through them to see if I could identify the person concerned … but as I don’t have them I have to rely on my memory – or google them to see if I can find one on the internet … sometimes I can. Sometimes it helps but on other occasions they seem to have changed quite a lot since I last saw them. The other day I came across a page with photographs from a school reunion … and came face to face with many people from my past … some of whom don’t seem to have changed that much over the years. I hope I haven’t … but I suspect that I have.
Once I was chatting with some friends and one of them posed the question: “If the house was burning down and you had time to rescue just thing … what would it be?” The answers varied … but one of my friends said: My photographs. They encapsulate memories. At the time, I noted the response, thinking “That’s an interesting point.” It’s only now that I realize exactly how right he was.
Occasionally I get out what photographs I do have and flick through them … people here are always interested to see them and ask me lots of questions about them.
Photographs are really quite important here. It doesn’t matter how old, bad or out of focus they are … people really treasure them. They are likely to keep them carefully and bring them out at any opportunity to pass round. They can tell you who took the snap, when and where … and probably an awful lot of extraneous details, like how much vodka each person drank.
I remember that once, in Almaty, when a friend and I were taking snapshots of ourselves in a park and an old lady maneuvered herself to get into the shot. Afterwards she came up to us and asked if it was a Polaroid camera, and if she could have a look. She was very disappointed when we told her it wasn’t. It was in the days before digital cameras, and sp we couldn’t show her on the little screen. She then asked when we would get the film developed and printed – could she have a look then … Unfortunately, we were due to leave for Bishkek the next day and would get the film processed until we home. I now know that I should have taken her name and addressed and have sent her a copy, but I didn’t think of it at the time. Much to my regret.
One of the nice parts of our job, knowing how people value such photographs, is receiving photos from a client who has promised someone that they will send them a copy, and being able to forward them on to the intended recipient. It can be frustrating, however, as we don’t always get an address … and something like:
“Sadyk Toktoraliev, Naryn Oblast, Kyrgyzstan“
just isn’t enough.
Bishkek