Wilkommen! And bienvenue! Welcome!

Hello, my name is Garry and as the name of this blog suggest I have too many theatre programmes.

As I write this I'm 54 years old so I've probably been going to the theatre regularly for thirty years, and over that time the frequency of my visits has increased. I always buy a programme, if there is one, which I guess I started doing because it felt like that's what people did but now it just feels like an integral part of my visit. At the very least it helps me identify who I've just seen if I'm sitting in a cheap seat at the back of my nearest theatre in Norwich, but hopefully it will also give me some insight into the production and a bit of history. When I've read them I store them in a box under the bed and this is where the problem lies:

I live in a very small house, an old-fashioned two up, two down. Two of those rooms - the kitchen and bathroom - are about six feet square so the rest of the house has to make up for the lack of storage everywhere. And now, after living in this house for thirty years, the piling up of stuff under the bed has to stop.

People told me not to throw away memories, but they were people with bigger houses to store them in, or who paid for storage away from their house, or who had less of this kind of thing to store in the first place. I simply can't keep them any longer. There's no more room. And realistically I never look at them and even if they were more accessible I don't suppose I'd look at them. They can't stay under the bend until I die and one of my sister's kids gets the job of chucking them in a skip.

But I realise they needed to be recorded in some way, and at first I was going to create a database so I could search it. Then a friend suggested photographing them, which seemed like a good idea but I wanted to record the cast in a way I could search so I could see who I'd seen in what if my memory failed me. You can search a blog so here we are. If I was younger this might be an Instagram thing or even TikTok but I'm older so it's another blog. 

I hadn't intended it to be public but the fact I've explained myself at length suggests it's going to be. So, welcome to the theatre programmes from the boxes under my bed.