Going through his dad’s old desk drawers brings back happy analogue memories for Jon Honeyball

company; she became famous for her book Pearls of Childhood about her family members’ deaths in Belsen, and her own rescue by Sir Nicholas Winton. Each turn of the page brought back names from my childhood, and I was nine all over again.

I even found dad’s old fountain pen, dry as a bone, and spent another 30 minutes cleaning it in water and filling it with fresh ink. This couldn’t just go back into a musty drawer: it now sits on my desk, next to my keyboard and trackpad.

Then it struck me: all of these artefacts were from a wholly analogue era. The maps have been superseded by the likes of Google Maps, which are of incomparable usefulness even before you factor in GPS, route planning and Street View. His diary would now be an account in Exchange Server, with a cloud-based email and calendar. His fountain pen would be an Apple Pencil with a flat battery.

In truth, it would all be lost. It would be old data stores and obsolete gadgets that you simply wouldn’t bother to keep. In our push to digitise everything, we’ve gained unprecedented access to information, but we’ve also lost so much: the distillation of binary data has stripped humanity from the process. Analogue may be inefficient and physically fragile, but there’s more to it than just the content. When I look at my father’s battered, creased and faded leather diaries, complete with crossings out and scrawled notations, I hardly need to ask whether I’d experience the same emotional connection to an Outlook diary plan.

And so I wonder, of what we are doing now, what will remain for future generations? Will any child look back fondly on an old, non-functional iPad and experience a wave of memories like I had that afternoon, as I gently unfolded those old, much-thumbed maps and diaries? I can’t believe that they won’t rue our move into the digital realm, and the distillation of everything down to its efficient, compressed, hollowed-out core data.

For myself, I shall wait another ten years before I pull open those wooden drawers and peek inside again. Maybe I should find the time to throw out the obvious rubbish – the broken rubber bands, the biros with no ink, the old receipts and the paperwork from decades ago. But then again, there’s no rush.

In our push to digitise everything, we’ve gained unprecedented access to information, but we’ve lost so much

Jon Honeyball is a contributing editor to If he’s late to your next meeting, it’s because he’s trying to plan the route on a 1960s Ordnance Survey map. On his motorbike. Email jon@jonhoneyball.com