The stories we tell at the dinner table

Every family has them. The stories that surface at gatherings - at Christmas, at Sunday lunches, at weddings - told in almost exactly the same way every time, with the same pauses, the same exaggerated details, the same punchline that everyone already knows but laughs at anyway.

The story about what happened on the way to the hospital. The one about the summer the car broke down. The thing someone said at a funeral that everyone agrees they shouldn't have found funny, but did.

These repeated stories are easy to take for granted because they feel so permanent. They've been told a hundred times. They'll be told a hundred more. They're not going anywhere.

But they do go somewhere. They go with the people who hold them.

What repeated stories reveal

The stories a family returns to aren't random. They've been selected, over time, through a kind of informal editing. Some things that happened get mentioned once and fade. Others keep coming back, refined slightly with each telling, until they're almost polished - a small piece of family mythology.

What gets selected tends to be what a family needs. A story that shows a grandparent's stubbornness or good humour. A story that explains why a certain branch of the family lives where it does. A story that makes something difficult into something survivable by making it funny.

The stories that get repeated are the ones a family has decided, without discussion, are worth keeping. They define how a family understands itself - what it has come through, what it values, who it remembers and how.

They're also, often, the ones that connect to the objects we talked about last week. The story about where the table came from. The story attached to the photograph on the wall. Stories and objects tend to belong to each other.

The version problem

Here's the difficulty: repeated oral stories drift. Each telling is slightly different from the last. Details shift. Someone remembers it one way; someone else remembers it differently. The story acquires new elements and loses old ones over time.

By the time a story has been told a hundred times, it may have wandered considerably from whatever actually happened. That's not necessarily a problem - the drift is itself interesting, and telling a story well matters as much as telling it accurately. But it does mean that writing it down at some point, while people who were there are still around, captures something that would otherwise keep moving.

It also means that what gets written down should probably include the disagreements. "My uncle always says it was a Tuesday, but my mother is certain it was a Sunday." That uncertainty is part of the record.

The one you'd tell right now

Think of a story from your family - one that gets repeated, or one that you find yourself telling. It doesn't have to be dramatic. It doesn't have to be long.

Write it the way you'd tell it out loud. The way you'd sit forward slightly and say, "Have I ever told you about the time..."

Include the details that make it yours: the place, the people, the particular thing someone said. Include what made it worth repeating - the humour, or the unlikeliness of it, or the way it shows something true about someone you loved.

Don't worry about whether it's complete. Oral stories never are. That's part of what makes them oral stories.

The people who need to hear these

One thing that often goes unrecognised is how much these stories mean to people who weren't there for the original events. Children and grandchildren who know a family mainly through its repeated stories. People who only met someone near the end of their life, and know the earlier years only through what gets told.

For those people, the stories aren't entertainment. They're biography.

Writing them down - recording them properly, with the voices and the details intact - is a way of making sure they survive the people who hold them. If you'd like to record yours, MeldLife is a good place to keep them, alongside the photographs and the objects that belong to the same world.

Start with the story you'd tell right now. The one already forming in your mind.