as a once-over-lightly online tourist attraction, but as a (carefully curated) irruption of the absolute pastness of the past into the would-be frictionlessness of the virtual world. Curiously, the site seems to be down at the moment so I'll have to make my argument from memory. I'm thinking of the posts in which the past appears in unlikely form (colourised images of the Blitz, for example, or moving images from a period earlier than we might imagine possible). Or the childhood film footage of the "80 year old girl", which swoops with great pathos from the 1930s right down to the present day of the woman whose birthday is being celebrated. Or the occasional post in which true period photos are compared with false period photos, or a photo is presented without a date, for us to interpret and locate. To my mind, the site's purpose (and value) is not simply cultivating or provoking nostalgia, but bearing vivid and interruptive witness to the way the past (as we never knew it) is gone , even while seductively appearing to be preserved in digital aspic. I always come to the site with eager delight, and often come away from it feeling slightly hollow, temporal, terribly contingent... and thus alive. (An opposite dynamic applies to your own good site: I show up slightly nervous about what I might find to challenge me, and come away feeling happily provoked and inspired. Oh, and also alive). But I am just one reader. wv: ersto