How terrible news from an old friend sent me deep into the archives of a world before digital cameras

The videos had been lugged around numerous rental addresses in a shoe box, with a total disregard for extremes of temperature and moisture... I had no idea what I’d discover on the tapes, writes Lucy SM Johnston

‘Going through them was miraculous, yet deeply unsettling, a portal to the already lost: times, places and even versions of ourselves that no longer exist’ (Lucy SM Johnston)

When Toby, a friend I’d known since meeting on an art foundation in Salisbury in the 1990s, sent word that things were not well in his world, the email was devastating. “Brain tumour, size of a plum already”, he wrote. “Inoperable. Months left – maybe a couple more.”

I knew immediately what I had to do and unearthed the box of old home movie tapes I hadn’t viewed in decades. Lugged around through the history of my rental addresses in a shoe box with a total disregard for varying extremes of temperature and moisture, I had no idea what I’d find, apart from – I hoped – Toby on some of them.

Few were even in the the right cases, with others containing the jeopardy of, “but is it really blank?”