Going through the family archive of documents can be an emotional roller coaster. Often (as was most recently the case at the time of my mother’s demise in April 2024), one needs to find a specific elusive paper that you thought was safely filed away in this folder, only to find it has mysteriously migrated elsewhere and one has to turn the house upside down in order to retrieve it.

Too often, one finds that a precious document or photograph has gotten even yellower and more brittle and fragile. Then one has to digitise it and live in hope that one will remember where that jpeg gets filed away, and hope it doesn’t get corrupted or deleted due to some computer virus or other hocus-pocus that I can’t understand.

But there are some photographs and letters that stop you in your tracks from whatever your initial quest had been and take you in a completely different direction. It doesn’t happen often, but it is quite an experience when it does.

Last month, our family visited Goa’s Aguada fort, now for some inexplicable reason re-branded as “Aguad”, dropping the final “a”. Maybe it is easier for the visitor and tourist to pronounce. Why don’t we drop the...