I spent last week in the UK doing a job I had been putting off in my mind for far too long: clearing out my late mother and father’s belongings from our little house there and getting it ready for the new owner.

If you have ever done this, you will know it is never just one job. It is dozens of smaller jobs piled on top of each other, and the more you look at it, the more insurmountable it appears. There is the physical side of it, the lifting, sorting, carrying, deciding what stays and what goes. And then there is the other side, the emotional weight of being confronted with an entire life laid out in objects that mean very little to anyone other than you.

A drawer becomes decades of the past. A biscuit tin with the Queen on it becomes a story you had not thought about for years; a newspaper clipping of my Dad running away from home and becoming a local scandal in his hometown of Elsecar – he only got as far as Dover rather than Germany, which he’d planned. He also took the church choir out on strike, but that’s a different story.

Part of what we had to do was look through hundreds and hundreds of photographs. Boxes and boxes of them. Envelopes by the dozen. Some were even in albums with notes as to who the images depicted. Loose prints that had slipped out over the years and found their way into the backs of cupboards and the bottoms of drawers. These photographs went right back to the First and Second World Wars, showing relatives who fought, and then moved forward through weddings, holidays, birthdays and the ordinary days that nobody thinks will matter until suddenly they are all that matter in a moment of reflection.

Every photograph carried a different emotional weight. Some were easy to look at and raised a smile. Others stopped me dead in my tracks and took me totally to another time and place. Some meant nothing, and I was baffled as to who and why they were in there. There were pictures of me, my parents, my grandparents, and other relatives, some still alive and others now gone. I could feel a part of my brain trying to process the volume of it all, as if it was attempting to file every face into the right place in my memory before moving on to the next one. If you have ever done this job, I’m sure you will have had this feeling.

When I got back to the hotel that night, I was thoroughly knackered, not just from shifting furniture and lugging boxes around, but from something harder to put a definitive finger on. A kind of emotional exhaustion that comes from being bombarded by images you are directly connected to, to a greater or lesser degree. You can’t simply look at that many photographs. You travel through time whether you want to or not.

As I lay there in my (very comfortable) Premier Inn bed, my mind drifting towards sleep, it wandered not only through the photographs but towards how music affects us, too. In fact, the thing that really prompted this piece was not lying in bed at all; it was the music playing earlier while we were eating dinner in the hotel.

As I tucked into a rather delicious Thai green curry, with a side of chips because I was in Yorkshire and chips go with everything, the piped-in music floated over to our little spot away from the main hubbub of the bar. It was background music, barely noticeable, until suddenly it was not.

The Carpenters came on.

For those who do not know, The Carpenters were essentially the brother and sister duo of Karen and Richard. They were huge in the 1970s and a regular feature of family listening back then. In our case, they were a constant presence on eight track while my folks and I drove off on holidays or went out “for a drive” on a Sunday afternoon when the pub was shut.

And just like that, I was no longer in a hotel in Yorkshire.

I was back in a yellow Ford Capri that had a black vinyl roof. I could see the dashboard. I could feel the movement of the car. I could remember the view out of the side window and that very particular feeling of being a child in the back seat, half bored, half content, and completely unaware that this ordinary moment was quietly embedding itself into my memory for decades to come – had I been a more academic child, I’d have loved to have studied memory and sleep.

There’s another tune that evokes a very specific moment on the motorway with my boyhood friend Wayne Storey and his family on the way to a week in Blackpool. The song is What Are You Doing Sunday, Baby (that is referenced in the Pulp song that is kind of in the title of this piece), and every time I hear it (or think even about it), I have the same hazy memory. I don’t actually think the tune was playing in the car back then, but rather it was a bit of an earworm. It’s a very odd memory!

The Carpenters’ tune was no different to recalling a specific photograph I had looked at earlier that day, one of ducklings and their mother taken on the banks of Lake Windermere when I was five or six years old, perhaps younger. The photograph showed me the visual setting, but the music brings back the actual feeling of something experienced well over fifty years previously.

And that was the moment it really struck me. Music, like photographs and certain smells, has the ability to take us back in time and evoke very specific feelings from years and years ago. Decades, even.

Music and other stimuli are, in a way, the punctuation marks of our past. They break our lives into paragraphs and longer chapters. They underline important moments. They have the power to transport us back to another time and place in our memory. You will have experienced this, I’m certain.

We all know this instinctively. We remember the rush of euphoria at the first gig we ever went to. Couples have “our tune” for a reason. A single song can bring back an entire relationship, for better or worse. Music does not just remind us of what happened. It reminds us how it felt.

I have seen clips on television of older people living with dementia who appear withdrawn and distant, suddenly coming alive when music from their past is played. They sing along, word for word. They tap their feet. Their faces change. For a moment, they are there again in a way that seems to bypass the disease entirely.

It is not that music cures dementia. It doesn’t. But it can reach places that other things can’t. Even when names are forgotten and faces no longer connect, songs learned decades earlier often remain intact. Music seems to live in deeper parts of the brain, bound up with emotion, repetition, rhythm and identity. I don’t know what psychological mechanisms are at play, but something is obviously hard-wired into our consciousness.

In care settings, music is often used in very simple ways. Familiar songs are played at certain times of day. Playlists made up of music that mattered to that individual earlier in life. Group singing, not as a performance, but as participation. The benefits might not be measurable in any scientific way, but in smiles, in a sense of connection that briefly returns to the people who connect with specific tunes.

The same applies to people with severe brain injuries or those described as being in persistent vegetative states. Music is sometimes used not because it guarantees recovery, but because it can provoke responses when little else does. A change in breathing or a shift in the patient’s expression. In situations where progress is measured in tiny successes, even those almost imperceptible moments matter.

Perhaps that is why music can cut through, even when so much else fails. Not because it is cleverer than disease or injury, but because it is woven into us at such a fundamental level. It is tied to who we are, not just what we remember. There’s something almost primordial about it.

Back in the hotel restaurant, The Carpenters faded out, and another song took its place. The spell was broken. But it left something behind, and as I’m writing this a week later, I can sense the same feeling as the tune plays silently in my head.

Back at the hotel and after a day spent clearing out a life, lifting boxes, making decisions, and being confronted with loss, a song that I had not chosen, playing quietly in the background of a hotel bar, reached out and tapped me on the shoulder. Music can be time travel. Not time travel in the Back to the Future sense. Not a return in a physical way. More like a small window opening for a moment in a wall you thought was solid. You look through, you see the ghosts of the past, and then it closes again. You are back in the present, with your curry and your chips, and the knowledge that the people in the photographs are still gone.

As an aside, Linette and I stayed in Manchester on the way home, and Lin bought herself something from Tiffany that she’s been on about buying for years. She bought it, and then we moved across the way to a traditional English pub called The Mitre. As I sat down with my pint of Boddingtons, the piped-in music became apparent. The tune was Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Deep Blue Something. It’s a song I recall but never really got into, but as we sat in that pub, I think we were both well aware that our brains were forming a connection to a moment and a specific piece of music.

Read More Sunday Thoughts.

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