Curator's Journal

When the original site quietly went dark in 2019, I assumed the archive was gone. Backups had lapsed. The domain was auctioned. What remained lived in three ring-bound notebooks and a shoebox of printed pages.

Recovery, it turned out, was less a matter of software and more a matter of patience. Each surviving entry was retyped, re-verified against public sources, and reviewed one more time before being restored. The archive that returned is smaller, slower, and — I hope — considerably more careful.

The first hundred entries were never planned. They accumulated. Writers, then engineers, then a surprising number of long-distance walkers.

Reviewing them together for the first time, a shape began to emerge — one the archive has been quietly noticing ever since.

Some Alastairs were found deliberately. Others arrived through footnotes, misprints, and long chains of correspondence with strangers who had noticed the archive existed.

The unexpected discoveries have often turned out to be the ones I return to most.

Every entry begins as a name and a plausible source. From there, it is checked, cross-referenced, and — usually — set aside for a while. Time tends to reveal whether an entry belongs.

The archive favours accuracy over volume. It always has.

The best part of maintaining the archive has never been the entries themselves. It has been the letters, emails, and postcards from readers who wanted to tell me about their uncle, their neighbour, their grandfather's Sunday-league goalkeeper.

Some of those Alastairs are now in the collection. Many, respectfully, are not. All of them are appreciated.