Today

Photos. What a wonderful invention. It allowed people a wholly new opportunity to record history. I've been going through all our photos. It's been about fours years since my last big album update and there are about 2,000 photos at least that require cataloguing. I really enjoy doing it. I've got a system; Photos with us, family, friends and significant locations related to events (such as snow in the Close) go in the big family album - now on volume 5. I cut up quite a lot of them and paste them into collages representing various occasions. The Family albums are big, black paged, glue 'em in jobbies. I use a silver pen to write appropriate comments.

For other holiday pics I simply slip them into wallet-style albums with suitable labelling. I have 3 albums devoted to our 30th wedding anniversary; one uncritically has all the pictures taken on the disposable cameras that we left lying about. The other two were lovingly compiled by my half-brother Keir who used Paul's SLR to take them. We also have some albums that we put together for Paul's Mum when she got to the point of being very likely to forget within minutes that she'd just been to a Christmas party or something. These have narrative as well.

I also don't chuck out pictures just because they don't show me in a good light or something. Even if I look 20stone and drunk, in they go!

So it's quite a labour, not made easier by the fact that Paul owns an SLR, a digital camera, a digital camcorder and camera phone and I own a digital camera.

In My Day

We also had family albums. My father was a keen photographer and had a darkroom, I remember being allowed in there with him sometimes. There were dim red-toned lights that wouldn't fog the film. He would have dishes of developer and fixative. I used to love watching the pictures emerge. Timing was all - leave it too long and the picture would be too dark, too short and a pallid photo would be the result. No-one was allowed to disturb him on his darkroom sessions and once in the room with him you couldn't go out, not even to the bathroom.

He used photos to make our annual Christmas card; once even playing with effects - choirboy (David in his St Paul's rig) in a bottle. There was an exciting series of pictures taken when they knocked down two houses opposite with great big iron balls on chains and there were the usual family photos.

Daddy made the albums, using his bookbinding skills, and put in the photos much as I do today. They were all black and white, of course.

Much later came the cine camera, colour and my Mother's twin-lens reflex which was used to produce slides.

I loved them, and love them still. The family album is shared out amongst us siblings and I just love to look at it.

In fact, I wonder who's got it at present? I think it's time I borrowed it.