The Stories We Carry With Us

I have come to believe that our memories are a large part of what makes us who we are.

Not just the big moments. Often it is the seemingly insignificant ones that stay with us.

A song. A photograph. A journey. A summer evening. A conversation. A place we haven't seen for decades.

And sometimes all it takes is a few seconds for everything to come back.

My own memories stretch across very different chapters of my life.

I remember my school days, selling drinks at cost price in the school cafeteria during breaks and playing music at the same time. I remember playing field hockey and tennis when I was young.

I remember travelling around the Mediterranean with my parents and discovering places I had previously known only from books: Pompeii, Athens, Crete, Olympia, Rhodes and Constantinople.

I remember running a youth film club with friends in our local community. We rented films from the major distributors and sometimes as many as 400 people would turn up to watch them.

Later came the clubs.

After finishing school, I became a professional DJ and spent the 1980s and 1990s working in some of the most popular music clubs in my hometown.

Then came other chapters. Graphic design. New interests. New ways of being creative. And, for the past thirteen years, running social media communities simply because I enjoy doing it.

Very different things.

And yet, looking back, there seems to be a thread connecting all of them.

Music. Images. People. Places. Stories.

Music has always been my time machine

There are songs I cannot hear without being transported somewhere else.

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band's Still the Same takes me back to the first time I went on holiday with friends. I can almost see those evenings again, sitting around campfires by the gravel lakes.

Christopher Cross and Ride Like the Wind takes me somewhere completely different.

I am back in a car with my best friend at the time, driving through the snow towards St. Moritz to visit his girlfriend. I remember the crystal-clear Alpine air, the sunshine and mountain rivers rushing through the landscape.

Other songs take me to the very beginning of my club days, before I even became a DJ. Mother's Finest performing Baby Love live. Peter Allen's live version of I Go to Rio. And many, many more.

Then there is The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats.

That one takes me straight back to my time as a DJ at the Depot.

We had the record about a year before it became a major hit. It was so special to us that we crossed out the information on the record so nobody could find out who the artist was.

That was another world. Long before you could identify a song in seconds with a phone.

And Bob Marley's live version of No Woman, No Cry can take me even further back, to the music I used to play in the school cafeteria.

U2's With or Without You and Where the Streets Have No Name bring back another kind of memory entirely: enormous concerts, tens of thousands of people, and music that seemed to define a particular moment not just for me, but for an entire generation.

These are only a handful of examples. There are hundreds more.

A song may last four minutes.
The memories attached to it can last a lifetime.

Photographs can do the same thing

I only have to look at my photographs from Kenya and suddenly I am there again.

What began as a spontaneous holiday became an experience I would never forget. The Indian Ocean. Palm trees. The colours. The landscapes. And the incredible experience of going on safari and seeing elephants and giraffes in the wild.

Years later, the photographs still have the power to bring that feeling back.

Then there is Miami.

I look at those pictures and I am immediately back there with my brother. I remember the incredible heat and humidity and weather that could change completely within five minutes. I remember driving through a city I had known from Miami Vice long before I ever experienced it myself.

And I remember looking out towards the Atlantic.

Southern Spain brings back something different again.

Málaga, Marbella and Algarrobo, where an apartment belonging to a colleague of B. became our base for exploring the south of Spain together.

When I look at those photographs today, I don't just remember what those places looked like.

I remember what it felt like to be there.

And perhaps that is what photographs and music have in common.

They don't simply document our past. They unlock it.

The things we don't want to lose

Some memories are spectacular. Others would mean almost nothing to anyone who wasn't there.

A record with its name crossed out. A campfire beside a lake. A road through the Alps. The view through a hotel window. A sunset behind a palm tree. A song played in a school cafeteria.

But perhaps those small memories deserve to be preserved just as much as the big ones.

Because together they tell the story of a life.

Not a perfect version of it. Not every day, every place or every event. Just the moments that somehow stayed.

So why Con Anima? And why now?

The idea of creating a place like this has been with me for a long time.

I have always enjoyed being creative, and I have wanted somewhere of my own where I could bring together the things that move me: music, photographs, places, memories and stories.

What has changed is that technology has finally made it much easier for me to turn those ideas into something real without the technical side constantly getting in the way.

So after thinking about it for years, I finally started building that place.

I called it Con Anima.

“With soul.”

This isn't meant to be an archive of everything I have done or everywhere I have been. And it certainly isn't about living in the past.

It is about recognising that the past becomes part of us.

I want to remember the big events, but also the little stories that might otherwise disappear one day.

The music I've heard.
The places I've seen.
The people I've shared them with.
The photographs that bring them back.
The stories I still carry with me.

Maybe that's what Con Anima is really about.

Not documenting everything.
Just giving a home to the things worth remembering.

Chris