The business of nostalgia

Sorry it's bit a while since I've updated this blog. I try to write about things that interest me or things that are an event in my life that I'd like to keep a record of - preserving a great deal of my thoughts and memories for the ages. Unfortunately, for the last few weeks and months I've been in a weird state. I've been unable to transcribe what I wanted to write into words. In fact, as I type this, there are several posts sitting, unfinished as I suffered a block. I'm going to have another go now with a post about nostalgia.

In early January, the BBC showed a series of programs looking at the last decade and investigating the trends that emerged. One of the major trends was a reluctance of people to grow up and their desire to cling to their childhoods. Certainly nostalgia has become a big business as companies realise that money can be made from this desire. Weirdly this seemed to coincide with my time as an undergraduate. It always seems that trends have followed what I'm interested in. It may be that most of the time, it's in fact me following trends, but this time it definitely seemed the market trend followed on from my thoughts. Anyway, it's apparently commonplace to reminisce about your childhoods at university - it makes sense as everyone is roughly the same age so their pop-culture memories are likely to be the same. My friends and I talked about toys we used to play with and television shows we used to watch. Films aren't really included as they were available on video or on TV again and again. The real nostalgia-inducers were TV shows. In 1999, DVD hadn't taken off and was still expensive and there were very few TV VHS sets. Naturally we got talking about shows such as the A-Team, Knightrider and ThunderCats and other shows from the 80s. We even went so far as to set up a college society: Trevelyan Alternative Movie Plus Animated Cartoon Society (TAMPACS). At this point in history, several things were about to happen that would explode this nostalgia out of college rooms and into the mainstream. The first was the gradual rise of DVD. With it's simplified manufacturing procedure, the costs would rapidly fall so entire runs of TV shows became affordable. The second was the internet. For the first time, people could virtually gather in chatrooms and forums to reminisce and people began converting old VHS recordings into digital video and slowly, in this still pre-YouTube age of dial-up internet, it became possible to hear the opening and closing themes and even see the opening and closing titles of all those half-remembered childhood favourites. This was a chance to post your half-remembered parts of a forgotten show and Over the next few years there was an explosion of 80s tv shows released onto DVD riding the nostalgia wave. It wasn't just tv shows that enjoyed this collective desire to relive the past - retro gaming became big as a whole heap of 80s and 90s games came back onto the market in the various virtual console stores and retro compilation sets.

This is where the second part of this post comes in - how this nostalgia affects us. Most of these retro things such as forgotten TV shows, primitive video games and even music are from fairly sharply defined parts of our past. A further good example of this is magazines. In today's world, we have the internet with it's up to the minute news and information from around the world. However, back in the 90s I got most of my information about things I liked from magazines that, by their nature were out of date by the time they hit the news stands. I used to read a couple of console magazines religiously for about 4 years or so: Mean Machines (which became Nintendo Magazine System) and SuperPlay. They were published monthly and I used to read them from cover to cover, even if certain games didn't appeal to me. Although I still have the physical copies of these magazines, they have long since been boxed up in the attic. However, there is a Mean Machines archive and over Christmas I found a torrent for a complete set of SuperPlay scans. Reading back through these magazines gave me shots of pure nostalgia - and not just of reading the magazine, but memories of what was going on at that time. And it's occasionally some really random things that my mind has associated with these things. For example, when I see the November 1991 issue of Mean Machines, it really reminds me of the day I went to buy the magazine. I can picture walking into town (despite the fact that I have walked that same route thousands of times, I can still remember that day, for no particular reason) and buying it. It had the Megadrive game F22 Interceptor featured on the cover and came with a free model of MM editor Julian Rignall. I remember getting home and flicking through the magazine while I watched an episode of Star Trek: TNG. I can't remember what episode it was but I'd know it if I saw it again. Similarly, the issues of MM and SP I took with me to India are burned into my mind as they were all I had to entertain me over the weeks we were there. Moving on to TV shows, when I was about 9 or 10 there was a repeat of a show called Star Fleet on ITV every Saturday over lunchtime. I remember seeing it for the first time and going outside to play in the garden afterwards - it was when we still had a small rose tree on the small lawn. For months after that, I would try to make Lego models of the X-bomber and other ships from the show. Both times I remember it airing, I had the same problem - it finished its run when we were in India and our rubbish video could only record for two weeks (and it failed to do that most of the time!) so I never saw the end of the story. This would have been in 1990 at the latest. As the years passed by I forgot about Star Fleet, but eventually it came back to me at university and, thanks to the internet, I found the themes, intro videos and eventually the full series and all these memories came flooding back. In fact when I ordered the series as a series of VHS rips, when it arrived, I watched all 24 episodes in one go - something I'd never done before. Finally a rare example of a film. It was early December 1989 (I was 9) and one Saturday morning I began watching what I thought was a short animation. It started out in a small mining town and involved pirates and the government chasing these kids. Then we were shown a robot that had fallen from the sky which subsequently woke up. Eventually the action moved to a floating island and the pirates turned out to be good guys. It was epic at the time and it completely sucked me in. I didn't see that film again for over ten years. In fact it passed almost out of my memory except for occasionally remembering that sketchy outline, with the robot that fell from the sky being particularly memorable. Finally in 2002, I joined the DVD Forums and got involved in one of those "can you name this film?" threads. It turned out the film was Laputa: Castle in the sky - one on the early Studio Ghibli films. As luck had it the Studio Ghibli collection was in the process of being released in on DVD and within 6 months I had a region 3 DVD of Laputa winging its way to me. Watching it brought back all the memories: later on that Saturday, I went to see Father Christmas at the local village hall (which was odd as we normally went to a department store grotto with school) and I can still remember the small present I was given (a toy car). In fact, I could still pick that car out from all my others.

I've always been someone that can remember small things like this. On several occasions my friends have looked quizzically at me and asked "how do you remember stuff like that?" I don't know if other people experience the same experience when it comes to nostalgia, but I suspect they do. What makes it a completely unique experience from person to person, is that the memories triggered by nostalgia will always be different. Even people who experienced something together will have individual memories about it.

What is different in this day and age, is it's unlikely my story will be repeated - now there is such an abundance of retro and nostalgia businesses that everything from TV shows, to video games seems permanently available - from YouTube, through to DVD boxsets and virtual consoles means peoples' long-forgotten cult memories won't be so long-lost any more!

Visual tagging of music and it's manipulations

Something that I've touched on several times is music and what trends I've gone through over the years. What I want to focus on now is how music can affect us, how it binds itself to fragments of our lives and how we can be fairly easily emotionally manipulated by music. There are several links in this post to tracks on Spotify, so if you don't have an account (or got hold of a free account), you'll have to make do with the YouTube links. Of course, all the examples I'm going to give are highly personal as you'd expect. The upshot, aside from maybe discovering some new music, is that these tracks will probably illicit no (or completely different) emotional responses.

Unless you watch a lot of the music channels, music is - by definition - an aural experience. The upshot of this is that when we begin to link music with sights, thoughts and feelings we experienced with the times when we acquainted ourselves with the music. Here are some examples from various points through my life from my Spotify "memories" playlist (in no particular order):

Kent - 400 Slag

(It's Swedish before you start thinking anything else!) From 2006, I first picked up on this song from my beloved Pandora (before the feed to the UK was killed) and the album was the first one I bought as a result of Pandora. It's a long, moody intro and the singer has a really smooth voice which is a bit melancholic. The fact that the song is in Swedish means that you really focus on the melody - especially the sweeping choruses. While it's not the best song on the album, it's a song that takes my mind back to 2006 and sitting in my room in House 3 at Trevs. I think the best way to describe that entire year would be nihilistic: I feel I was living without purpose. What should have been a really fun and exciting year just past me by. While the song perhaps sets a depressing picture, I don't really see it as such - just as an aural passport back to that ridiculous room right next to the boiler (which never turned off).

T'Pau - China in your hand

Obviously this is an old one. When I was younger, I went to a swimming club on Thursdays. I was quite good at swimming, especially breaststroke, but I just wasn't competitive. Also, I lacked stamina and I found myself always struggling by the end of the sessions. I didn't know anyone else that went, so combined with my crippling shyness, I didn't have any friends there either. I also found some of the exercises (such as backstroke leg-kicks) fairly claustrophobic (I guess cos I could see where I was going and my ears were underwater meaning I couldn't hear anything and I felt disoriented). All this meant I really didn't look forward to going at all. The session began at 7.30 which meant I just had time to see who was number one of Top of the Pops before I had to go. I guess T'Pau was one of the most catchy tracks from that era and the two things are linked.

Radiohead - Lucky

At this point in my life, I still cling to the belief that the best album I have ever heard is OK computer by Radiohead. To my mind no other album went on such a journey from the raucous, confused and fuzzy opening of Airbag through to the chilled out, lethargic The Tourist. It could be argued that perhaps 2007's In Rainbows finally surpassed it, but being a guitar fan, I think OK Computer still just about stands out as their best for me. Now, the year was 2007 1997 (oh dear, that's a long time ago now!), and several of my friends who were into Radiohead were really excited about the release of OK Computer. Obviously at the time I was very impressionable and I immediately looked to see if any of my compilations had any of their songs as I wasn't familiar with them at all. I found that I had a CD with the track Just. It was a song that I'd skipped in the past as it was an immediate song. In fact, the intro to Just is a very confusing and intimidating beginning to a song. It seems strange now to say that a song intimidated me, but it did. I began to be intrigued by their style. Radiohead seem to be a very polarising band. In 1997, even more so. People either loved them or hated them. Thom Yorke's vocal style is very distinct and can take getting used to. After hearing Paranoid Android (the lead single from OK Computer) for the first time - and not being overly familiar with the band - it left me a bit cold, but there was something about the song nagging at me to go back to it. As OK Computer was released, Woolworths did it and The Bends for £20. I snapped them both up and set about listening to them. A week later I went on a family holiday to Rhodes which involved a night flight and arriving very early in the morning. The song that has perhaps the most immediacy is Lucky. It's a very desolate song, with the constant ringing of the guitar strings heard in the intro carrying on in the background all the way through the song almost like crickets. The tremelo effect of the lead guitar coming in and out throughout in the background and the choral synthesiser effects and backing vocals in the chorus all add to create a unique audio landscape. Travelling by bus across Rhodes from the airport at 5 am, I had my walkman playing this song when I peered through the curtains and saw a desolate rocky, barren desert outside. The view just perfectly fit with the music and this link has stayed in my mind ever since.

Hans Zimmer - Like a dog chasing cars

Back to 2008 and the release of The Dark Knight. I'd really enjoyed Batman Begins in 2005 as a great example of how far comic book movies had come in the last 10-15 years. Gotham was now a believable, gritty, crime-ridden city rather than the pantomime neon or overly Gothic creations seen before. Rumours were that The Dark Knight was even better but nothing could have prepared me for it. We drove down to Bradford to see the film at the IMAX screen. It was a pretty horrid day by the time we got there - overcast, raining and cold. The weather fit completely with the tone of the film. It was epic. Constantly tense, the music served to alternate between the schizophrenic, tension of the strings which marked out the Joker's presence, to the bursts of heroic theme which quickly transitioned back to a tension-raising version. By two thirds of the way through the film I felt completely emotionally drained. If anything, the film was too much to take in. This track I've chosen will always remind me of sitting in that cinema and being so overwhelmed with what was happening and the feelings carried over with me for days and are retained on repeat viewings.

Moby - Look back in

At the end of my 3rd year at Durham I felt quite depressed. The majority of my friends had finished their degrees and I knew the next year would be a very different experience. During that summer I began to rediscover some albums by listening to them in the dark. I suddenly found that effectively shutting off my visual inputs left me free to concentrate more on the music and let my mind wander to wherever the music took it. This short track from the album 18 was the one track that summed up this very reflective period in my life. It's very short at under 3 minutes in length, but has a dreamlike quality to it. The title - Look back in - captured how it made me feel: looking back over the last three years. I just wish it was a little longer. A lot of people didn't like the album 18 as they felt it was simply a poor rehash of Play, but there are a lot of really nice chilled out tracks such as One of these mornings and In this world.

So there you have it - some really wide ranging examples of a small selection of music that instantly transports me somewhere in my mind. I'm sure everyone has their own examples and I encourage you to think about them and use a service like Spotify to create playlists of them to send some emotional, nostalgic chills down your spine.

Of course, people know that music can act in this way and seek to take advantage of it. The obvious example is with soundtracks. As with my Dark Knight example, music can emphasise the impact of the moving pictures. It's hard to do, but try and find a dramatic scene from a film or show with and without the backing music and often it won't have the same impact without the music. Obviously, here the music is tailored specifically for the scene and scored to maximise any points or moments the director desires. A slightly less unique approach is that employed by advertisers. They know that music has the power to get straight through the logical part of your brain and wedge itself straight in the emotional part, which is exactly what they want so you don't question exactly why you need a new *thing* - you just want it! Often times, simplified, cut down arrangements can often get through to people. A good example of this is the John Lewis Christmas campaigns. Here are the 2008 and 2009 adverts





Both feature stripped back versions of famous songs. The irony is that the Sweet Child Of Mine cover was released as a single, but didn't actually work as a song as it's far too dull an arrangement to sustain interest beyond the runtime of the advert. The piano is one of the best solo instruments to achieve this effect of conjuring up the required emotion. I'll finish this off with a piano arrangement of a suite of music from one of my favourite films, Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Regular readers may remember that this film features large portions of silence, which Disney didn't think Western audiences would be comfortable with, so they actually commissioned the original composer to re-score these previously silent passages when the film came to be released in the West!

All change

So. After ten years (with a nine month break in the middle) I'm finally leaving Durham. No, I've finally left Durham. How did this happen? Where am I now? Let me explain. For the past 2 years and 9 months I've been employed by Thorn Lighting and their parent company Zumtobel. The employment was on a fixed contract for the duration of the TOPLESS project (a 3 year project to develop white light-emitting polymer materials for lighting applications). Until Christmas last year I wasn't really thinking about the end of my contract. I was vaguely confident that more money would be forthcoming - either from Thorn or from Durham University to continue our promising work in the field of high-triplet hosts and novel soluble blue phosphorescent emitters. However, no such money materialised and although it looks like a Thorn-led follow-up to TOPLESS will gain public funding, it will most likely be mostly engineering-based with the chemistry/materials development handled outside the project. This situation meant that all the Durham-based workers (a total of 5) were facing the dole. Thankfully just about everyone manage to find alternate employment. I was fortunate that a job opened up at CDT in January and this time, after a 4 hour interview (with no breaks!) I was offered the job (3rd time's the charm). Of course this meant I was suddenly facing 3 weeks until I was due to start in Cambridge. This meant I had to tie up (or try to tie up) and hand over my work in Durham (i.e. lumping it onto other chemists), find somewhere to live in an unfamiliar city, pack up and move south. In the end I got a lucky break with packing the stuff up as we were able to negotiate a much cheaper extra months extension to our rent. This means I've still got a lot of stuff up in Durham for now.

It was pretty surreal packing up and coming home for Easter as it felt just like any other Easter, but I wouldn't be going back north to Durham, but east to Cambridge. Finding somewhere to live was interesting as Cambridge seems to be a city full of shared houses where you rent rooms rather than finding a flat between a few of you. This is in complete contrast to Durham where the onus is on renting out complete properties. Anyway I found a nice laid back house just off Chesterton Road which is a nice 35 minutes walk to work and 15 minute walk to the town centre. Hopefully these numbers will drop substantially once I bring my bike from home (assuming it hasn't fallen apart).

Having been in Durham for so long (and 6 years in the same lab/department) going into CDT was a complete change. Bigger fumehoods, different protocols, not knowing where anything is or how to submit samples for analysis. And this is just the chemistry - the meetings are a blur of acronyms - even for someone with 6 years OLED experience it's been a struggle to adapt, but I'm getting the hang of it. The work load started off light and has now ramped up to a level I'm still comfortable with - several targets and regular meetings/updates and polymers to be made. It's hard to believe I've just finished my third week. There are several other new starters on the chemistry side and there will likely be a few more in the next few months, but even so the company (at least the Cambridge office) is a lot smaller than I realised. This is mainly down to a lack of physical space of both desks and lab space. Everyone's really friendly and helpful and I'm sure before long I'll feel like I've been there for years.

Cambridge is really nice (it helps that I've arrived just as the weather is getting warmer). The tourists can be a bit much, but they tend to congregate around the town centre and the colleges in particular where everything is pedestrianised so it never feels too cramped. I haven't been punting yet, but I'm assured there will be company trips down the river to Grantchester over the summer and some evening punting sessions. I've just about figured out how to navigate around the different parts of the city (Google maps helps a lot), now I just have to remember where everything is!

I guess it still hasn't really sunk in that I've left Durham - it's all happened so quickly. I really miss everyone there and hopefully I'll be able to go back up for some weekends to see everyone and find out how they're all doing. It's always interesting to see how people get on when you leave - most of the time they don't even notice after a few weeks!

Anyway, my job is a permanent position (unless it turns out that I'm rubbish and get fired!) so hopefully there shouldn't be any more sudden changes unless I instigate them. And finally I have a pension (how grown up). The dental insurance means I might actually see a dentist for the first time in ages and I have the option of private health care too. Not too shabby.

Hopefully I'll start to feel the photography vibe again in my new surroundings which will enable to post some pictures of my new surroundings.

It's also a bit weird without most of my gadgets - my TV and other AV stuff will likely spend the next few months at my parents and once again I am living the minimalist lifestyle.

Anyway - till next time (and I'll try and update a bit more often!)

once more unto the breach

Once again I find myself packing to move. This time it's not so bad as it's only for an intermediate month-long period where I'll be living with Ollie and Rich. After that I'll move in with Emma and Barry for 6 or 7 months and beyond that who knows? Essentially I have two lists - one of things I'll need for a month and a second for things to bring up later when I'm more settled. Back in 1999 I had no idea what to pack for 9 weeks of term but over the next 4 years I became adept at cramming almost everything I would need during term into my parents' car (plus me and my parents). In 2003 I had to pack for 3 solid years of being away which wasn't too bad as I tried to shrink down the number of things I needed. This time I'm adopting my minimalist approach and have got it down to a suitcase, a box, a bag and my PC. Yep - my guitars are staying put for now. It still feels weird as this is the 3rd time I'm "leaving home" and as I try to extract and pair all my socks from the airing cupboard and decide which clothes to leave behind it strikes me that this could be the last time.

So I probably won't update this site for a month or so as I'll probably be limited to having the internet at work, but you never know.

PhD - over and out

Most people will tell you that a PhD takes three years. These people are wrong. Even if you were to finish your thesis and hand it in on the last day of the three years (like Matt did) it just won't go away. A few months later there's the viva, then you have to find the drive to do your corrections and get them approved followed by the arduous task of printing and binding multiple copies and finally the trip to submit them. On paper it all sounds like nothing compared to three years of work followed by writing a book, but it's really not that straight forward. A lot of supervisors will push their students really hard during the three years and then leave them to their own devices with the writeup. This means, if you aren't careful it can drag on and on and could even turn into something that just seems like it will never end. After all my issues during my final year, the one thing I clung on to was my determination to have the write up finished by Christmas. I'd seen far too many people not submit until the following summer - even Amy form my group who seemed to have nearly finished writing when she left took 8 months to submit. Thankfully, due to my ruthless efficiency at writing I managed that feat with a good two weeks to spare (in fact, if it hadn't been for a mix up with my supervisor I would have been done and dusted within 5 weeks of leaving). The plan back in September '05 was to start planning the write up over Easter and start writing soon after in the spare hours I had during the day. Those who know me will know what I think about plans...and sure enough Easter came and went with no planning done at all. It got to the start of July and I was starting to get worried as not only had I not started writing, but I hadn't started planning yet. The new plan became to have the literature review done and the rest planned out by the time I left. This time I exceeded expectations and left having completed 4 and a half out of seven chapters. Oh - and the Edison quote from the start - that took a few days of searching to decide on.

Halfway through my second year I was found my life and my chemistry were going pretty well and I told my lab-mate Carl that I wasn't scared of the idea of the viva. He didn't believe me but as the time drew closer I was actually terrified - not of the viva, but about how little work I'd done for it. Once it was done I was sent away with a list of typos and a couple of figures to tweak and 10 days later I had an approved thesis. With "the worst" behind me I took my foot off the gas pedal which was a mistake. I hunted around for the best paper to print on (which is so anal for something that is going to sit on a shelf for eternity). This was where I started to run into problems. The university "insists" on certain standards for the layout of a thesis - all the official guidelines tell us to ensure that our theses conform to BS4821. Unfortunately this standard was withfrawn in the 1990s and there is nowhere on the web that will tell you what the damn thing actually said! The graduate school weren't very helpful either; "we don't have a copy in Durham - Newcastle University library may have a copy." Well that's very helpful. Eventually I just decided to print it the way I'd done it. Thankfully I could get it bound at Birmingham university. Durham must be the only university in the country to not have a binding service. Even the local pronaprint won't touch theses. I mean come on - the library must do a shedload of binding with all the journals it gets not to mention the money to be made from the many thousands of students needed theses, projects, dissertations and reports binding. No wonder Durham seems to be leaking money all over the place. The final hurdle was sorting out the attached CD. I had three different sets of instructions on the requirements for CDs - it's as if the grad school simply forgot they'd already written requirements for CDs and wrote new ones. Twice. Eventually I just picked one and went with it.

This had taken nearly three months from the date of my viva - it should have been done in about a week. I imagined all sorts of grand things happening when I finally submitted my hardbound copies, but all that happened was the lady at the grad school desk simply took them off my and wandered off - I had to call her back just to get a receipt. A bit underwhelming. The thing is, Matt who handed in his thesis to be assesed in September only handed in his hardbound copies about a week before me in the end. My advice to anyone writing up - don't slack off once you get the viva out of the way - I was fairly well organised and it still took me three months to finish up everything - just go for it and finish it off. As it is my PhD has taken me 3 years, 6 months, and 25 days from start to finish (and I still have to sort out all the graduation stuff). I feel really sorry for all the physicists who have had their funding extended to 4 years - if they drag their feet over the write up even a little their PhD will consume half a decade of their life - more if the write up drags on and that's really scary. This is just training, not our life's work!

More advice? Ok - here's something I really wish someone had said to me along the way. Everyone needs to feel special at some point. I guess when you start a PhD you're really excited and feel different from our friends who left university after their degrees, but after a while it seems like everyone around you is doing a PhD too and it can feel like what you're doing is fairly common. I don't have the actual figure, but I hazard a guess that maybe 1% (if that) of the UK population has a PhD - what we're all doing is something amazing that very few people will ever get the chance to do and what you yourself is doing is probably something that a handful of people on Earth will be working on. I hope that gives you some kind of comfort in the struggle ahead.

The sad thing is that even though it's the 21st century, all the British Library will keep is a microfilm record of the title and contents pages. If someone wants a copy, then the BL will have to ring up Durham and some poor gimp will have to go and dig the thesis out of the depository and photocopy it. Wouldn't it have just been simpler for the BL to ask for a copy in PDF format? I know I'm potentially loosing royalty fees by doing this, but if you want a read of my thesis just click the link below.

clicky

Over the last few years I've been as happy as I've ever been, as unhappy as I've ever been and every point in between. I've always managed to get on with my work. I lot of people drop out, a lot of people take an age over the write up and lots more finish and then never want to do the subject again. I am not one of these people.

Minimalist lifestyles

Something that's become apparent to me since I got home is the relatively small amount of stuff I regularly use. I mean, most of my friends who were in my year would have got houses in 2002 whilst I've been living out of one room. And anyone who saw my room in House 3 at Trevs will know how small that was. But instead of seeing this as a drag it's really liberating. I've been trying to help my parents clean out our house and the amount of crap they keep for no reason is unbelievable. By living in such a small environment for so many years I've become accustomed to streamlining my stuff. I still find it really hard to throw things away - especially things with nostalgia value but you've got to do it. It's like 5 minutes of anguish after you bin it and that's it - you don't miss it. Matt and I coined the term minimalist lifestyle to reflect the lifestyle we've been living. I really love the idea of having one suitcase of clothes, a backpack of other items, a laptop and one trunk for shipping other things. In fact, when it looked like I might spend 6 months in the US teaching I was really excited to try out my ideas. Buy a laptop, put all my films into a 240-disc wallet, have all my music on my ipod, a suitcase of clothes and perhaps a trunk with slightly bulkier stuff. I used to think about taking a guitar as it's become so important in my life, but after seeing this I probably wouldn't even need one of those.

(watch all the way through cos when I saw it I thought "blah blah, whatever," but the sound is so good that I'm going to have to get this). My parents have filled the house with books but I love the idea of ebooks - Sony have already introduced their e-reader. Instead of shelves and shelves of books, imagine a device about the area of an A4 piece of paper that can hold as many books as you can fit onto a memory card. My friend Spike seems to have taken the opposite view. He moved to Australia for 3 years and decided to take as much of his stuff with him as possible to the point that one of his trunks had problems at customs due to the antique pistols in them...

I know that I'll probably get overrun with important documents and end up with a house full of crap, but it's nice to dream.