It’s a funny thing but it’s almost as if our parents don’t exist until we do. Even as we grow up, they can seem (at least in retrospect) peripheral figures, wrapped up as we are in our own experiences. I think this is as it should be. Children should be self-absorbed. After all what is childhood if it’s not finding yourself and your place in the world around you.

Discovering your parents are actually sentient human beings (and not just providers of endless lifts, cash handouts and carbohydrate-rich dinners) is quite a shock. That they actually had entire lives before you were born is both deflating and enriching in equal measure. What fascinates me is how this can be demonstrated in specific documents and the enormous value these have when your parents have gone.

I had a peripatetic upbringing thanks to my father’s military career. I remember the words '21 house moves in 25 years' being bandied about. Whether they were strictly accurate is beside the point. We moved a lot and possessions took on a different role as a result. We kept only what was necessary, deeply cherished – or small. Souvenirs of a particular foreign posting were allowed.

When my parents died, I was hugely touched to discover that even amidst the strict moving regime they had kept so many of my letters home from boarding school (as I had theirs to me). I also became the caretaker of some documents which had an illuminating effect on their earlier lives that has stayed with me and helped shape who they were in my mind.

The first is an Official Secrets Act declaration signed by my father on his commission into the British Army. It is dated 7 January 1963, just nine days before his 18th birthday. My father always told me he hadn’t finished school, having been unceremoniously kicked out of Ampleforth College for 'riding a bicycle drunk through his house master’s French windows'. The story may not be true (my brother was told an alternative version), but the dates add up.

Next is a pair of letters from the British Museum. On 15 November 1966, aged 19, my mother is offered 'a post in the grade of Temporary Clerical Officer at a starting pay of £568 a year'. She is initially only offered a three-month contract, but there is a further, much friendlier, letter sent to her father nearly a year later on 26 October 1967 saying 'we are glad to hear that Charlotte is going to stay with us until the rush is over'.

What do these papers – covering coincidentally similar stages in each of their lives before they had even met – tell me about my parents? For my father the signed declaration shows a sense of duty but also an implied opportunity for adventure and intrigue. Right up his ally. For my mother it shows she was valued and liked in her work as a restorer of paintings at a prestigious institution.

It makes me wonder what written footprint I will leave behind for my own children to read (and read into). There will be a mixed media of evidence. Even though I began sending emails in my teens, I existed in a largely paper world until I was 23, working in my early career for magazines and newspapers and keeping all my cuttings and before then many notebooks filled with tales of my travels and teenage angst.

I also have an Adidas shoebox bursting with letters from my nearest and dearest. If there’s a bundle from you in there you made the cut. One of my favourites is an Edward Monkton greetings card from my oldest friend, Izzy, depicting 'The PENGUIN of DEATH' and his 'enigmatic smile'. The best explanation I can offer my children is that this is the sort of humour we shared.

Aged 23 I got my first job in the digital sphere working for the Ski Club of Great Britain’s ‘New Media’ team which sounds so amusingly archaic now but is a good gauge of how new the concept of digital marketing still was in 2007. I created a lot of digital output for my work over the next eight years but eventually created my own WordPress blog, ‘onepotdish’. And now here I am writing again.

So if my children ever come up for air from their marvellously absorbing lives to ponder what their mum (provider of endless lifts, cash handouts and carbohydrate-rich dinners) was like before they were born, and in turn what their maternal grandparents (who sadly they never met) bring to the party, then look no further than here – or the Adidas shoebox.