ep.29 - West Park Park Bench Podcast - Legacy

Caron Lyon14min

Caron Lyon

00:04

Greetings. Welcome to Episode 29 of the West Park Park Bench Podcast. Today's episode is Legacy and legacy was the first word of the year that I really meditated on. And it came about in 2015 when audiences Europe was not progressing in the way that I really wanted it to. And I needed to find a trajectory to change the way I addressed the following year. You might recognise a pattern here so 2016 I decided I was going to take a word and I was going to keep that word in my head for a year.

Caron Lyon

01:01

If you've been listening to these podcasts since the beginning of the year, or since I did the first episode, which was nearly a year ago. In fact, looking at my notes, I think it might have been round about this time. I'm gonna have to see when the anniversary is. But the whole point of these podcasts have emerged out of this in particular, is being able to set your own parameters and set your own goals and ideals and challenges, and have metrics in which you then celebrate them and you recognise that you've succeeded or failed without having to have any external world intervention in that notion of achievement. Especially when it's not monetary. So yes, legacy and legacy was the word that I took to the very first devoted and disgruntled that I attended at Birmingham. Rep. And that year was a big turning point in the way... it's a really important milestone in the way that I started to look at my own person rise since last episode, Episode 28 was in fact horizons.

Caron Lyon

02:34

So legacy was something that I wanted to take forward. I kind of knew that things were going to change. And I had spent five years with audiences Europe, helping them put a very casual structure in place for their management of ambient comms. So all of the audiences Europe departments and specialists, all had their own companies, institutions that had marketing, comms marketing departments behind them, and they were looking externally but one of the things that my challenge was set was to give them some internal cohesion and internal cohesion amongst a group of people who would only be coming together because of this grant funded peer structure. And as audience developers, I really I really enjoyed taking on that challenge. And I was brought on to the project by someone called Richard Hadley. And he had this vision and this insight of what it needed to be, and he needed somebody to help put the stepping stones in place and help maintain those stepping stones and reinforcing them and enlarging them. But when the community found their niches, and I think this has been the difficult thing with that legacy, is that it only really held water whilst the project was trying to exist. And so legacy was really important to be able to know your own legacy and being able to keep a record of someone else's legacy even though something might have moved on and it might not be recorded. You can be the memory you can you can remember and I think that's that's really important.

Caron Lyon

04:44

So legacy, one of the things that made me choose legacy was not just so that I could reflect on connecting up my words of the year, but I record this podcast in West Park, in Long Eaton, and as we walk around West Park, there is a well trimmed hedge and it's in the shape of a trefoil and I've always noticed it when the first time I saw it, because those truffles and been having been a girl guide and a guide leader and a venture scout or whatever they were called. And I got various badges. I was I was always sort of curious and it was a star in the centre of it. And when I went and actually one day, took a step off the path and went to have a look at this star in the centre of this trefoil hedge. It's dedicated to the first girl guide have long eaten and I always there's no date on it. So it has no context. It's you know, it's like the Unknown Soldier. Is it modern? Is it modern in terms of being post 2000 Is it almost vintage myself something that was in the 70s 80s or 90s Or was it earlier than that? Is it a beginning of the scouting which I think 1910 I'm gonna have to check up the history and I'll put some links about the history of your guidance, and also the notes that I found out about this, but this was a good guide. Edith, shocking. I can't remember the name as I'm doing the podcast, so I'm gonna have to put that in the show notes too.

Caron Lyon

06:42

And I walked past it several times and as I've recently been going through my archive of photographs, so I always try to take photographs that are on my phones and they will go in Google Photo and they'll also go in Dropbox. There's an automatic sync and then I will go through my Dropbox photos and I will put them in a file for the month and then the end of the year. I will put them in a file for the year. And if I have time, I will go into those months and do a folder with collecting and you can use a programme that will do all of that for you. But for me the the legacy of going through those in a very simple way and grouping photos together in events. Is a reference for me, but also having Google Photos which has an algorithmic intelligence. If I want to go and find a photograph that was taken in long Eaton, I can search for long eaten and because the metadata has long eaten in it, it will find it. Likewise, if I want to find a photo that has a blue background or has a blue tone to it, I can type in blue and it will show me all the photographs that I have which have blue tones in them. Just that sort of simple intelligence of being able to extract photos and maybe tag them and so just knowing that the archive is there and it is secure is enough for my legacy time because it does take time and often legacy is the one thing that isn't it isn't funded and isn't paid for and I think with the audiences Europe legacy component, I was taken to project and I was asked to film and I was asked to stream and I was asked to tweet and do social media, blog posts. This is how I started doing these simple podcasts was by doing them live putting them straight up to Audioboo at the time and, and having an immediate presence of what was going on. But there was never any money to edit the footage that I finally had. So I have all of this footage of some amazing times that I was asked to join audience developers to showcase their work in Rome in Rotterdam in Copenhagen, in Brussels, but the actual coming together of those that footage at the end never really happened. Their legacy still was hanging in the air for me. And as someone who as a dyslexic kind of lives in a film it will those films are putting their cans and put to one side and I have to put them out of the way otherwise they would just keep playing in my mind. So pausing is not enough, it has to be stopped and packed away and put somewhere that I could go back into my archive back to the legacy.

Caron Lyon

09:49

So this legacy of this first Girl Guides have long eaten finally going through my photos, I decided that I was going to go to the one place that you could probably get that on the ground. Does anybody really know Facebook group and I went to the face the long eating community group. Now there's lots of Facebook groups. And if you spend time on local Facebook groups, there's some very different types and some aren't as welcoming and forthcoming with knowledge as others and it felt like this was one that I could put this question to so I asked the question, I had the photograph that I had and I put the photo in and said I've always been curious about this photograph. Can anybody tell me anything? And I was surprised that nobody knew exactly what it was. There was a couple of people who were able to give me some great leads. There was some people who had never seen it before. Despite knowing Green Park, West Park quite well, but I have found this out. I found out that she was the first guide leader of long Eaton and that it was roundabout 1925 1930 Potentially, and also that she might have been a dressmaker or seamstress in the town.

Caron Lyon

11:19

Two avenues of fact checking because I'm going to look into this and see if I can come find a legacy history. And also, I would really like to make a Wikipedia page because that's something that I want to challenge myself to create a Wikipedia page that actually gets accepted by the Wikipedia elves. Which is really hard to do with, especially people who are living, but even people who are living who have got fantastic history that tends to be analogue history, and not necessarily represented in digital worlds. Getting them recognised is really hard and I got a bit burned out trying a couple and I need to have another go at that. So this is really where this is coming from. So someone had contacted the council here.

Caron Lyon

12:13

And that was because there was an original stone unfortunately, the photograph isn't clear enough for me to read what was on the stone but it does look like it had dates on it. So I should be able to find that in the local records. Also, the conversation that was had with the city with the town council at the time was posted in a Facebook post. So I do have the old contact details, the email address, what was said at the time to give me context. So actually that's a really good piece of contextual investigation for me to continue. So I am going to put what I know so far, and this legacy is the progression of that really how we quantify a legacy and how we put it into a place in the world that will exist without us because a lot of my legacies, especially the archive footage, once I'm gone, the digital stuff will will remain on a hard drive and probably never be fired up again. So it is really important for things that you that you want to be recalled and I think in a world where stuff is so much more digital than it was before. We know so much now and we experience so much now and it's so rich and yet it will go it will be switched off when we go and I think that's really important thing to reflect on. So yeah, I will find out some more information. I will put it in the show notes. And I will I will keep you updated. So thank you for coming to the end of episode 29 legacy.

Caron Lyon

14:13

I'm really pleased I've got this far on them and I hope it might have inspired you to do something yourself. Any questions about how I do my process do let me know. And I will be back for episode 30

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