Steve's tapes

In the interests of grouping our records together, this is what I wrote on 7 February, 2009, about Steve's relatives in Canada and the tapes that they used to send to one another:

I'll be in touch again very soon but, in the meantime, I just wanted to tell youwhat happened when i asked Steve the 'do you have a relative who grew up in another country' question. After a bit of thought, he said that, yes, he has relatives who emigrated to Canada in (I think) the late 60s or early 70s and their children (now in their early 40s) are quite clearly Canadian rather than English. What is a bit spooky is what he said when i asked about audiorecordings. I'd thought that might be quite a long shot but, on the contrary,he said that, when he was a child, the Canadian relatives used to record messages on audio cassettes and send them to the family in England instead of letters. The English relatives would all get together to listen to the cassettes - that struck me as very typical of Steve's family! - and make a similar recording to send back. Apparently the replies sometimes featured Steve and his cousin, Sally, playing duets on the recorder :o) Steve doesn't know if any of the cassettes survive now but he reckons that, if anyone has hung onto them, it will be his mother and he's going to ask her about it when he sees her this evening. I thought that was amazing - not only did they make recordings but it sounds as if they were the main way that the two parts of the family sent news to each other.