An Ordinary Day Out
I don't usually like events that are coated with lots of expectation of Importance and Having a Good Time.
I like an ordinary day out. Let's go for a walk: let's go to the Dales: let's go for a pub lunch: let's go to the seaside. Oh yes, good idea, let's go! And often, it's fantastic, and the more relaxed for not having had that burden of expectation placed upon it.
All my life - well, as long as I can remember - I've enjoyed such days, and I've always taken my camera, since I had my first camera when I was about five or six.
So, lots of photos, lots of happy memories.
But sometimes an ordinary day out can turn, retrospectively, into a more important event than it seemed at the time.
Here's the Communist, having a good time walking at Bolton Abbey on February 18th, 2007, almost a year ago.
Whenever you pointed a camera at him when he was out, he always managed to look as though he owned the place. And, being a Communist, I suppose he would have done, given half a chance: though you would have had a share in it too.
This was the Communist's last walk at Bolton Abbey, a place he's loved all his life. We may perhaps be able to take him back there for a visit sometime, but he won't be able to walk because he had his right leg amputated in October.
At the moment he's living in a nursing home, though is currently back in St James's Hospital because he fainted: they think he's anaemic. Of course, if they send him back to the nursing home, where the food is good, I think he'll stand a better chance of overcoming anaemia than he might eating hospital food.
So I look at this photo, and it's good to remember how much he enjoyed that day. But it makes me sad too. And I'm thinking hey, one day very, very many of my photos are going to have that effect on me.
I like an ordinary day out. Let's go for a walk: let's go to the Dales: let's go for a pub lunch: let's go to the seaside. Oh yes, good idea, let's go! And often, it's fantastic, and the more relaxed for not having had that burden of expectation placed upon it.
All my life - well, as long as I can remember - I've enjoyed such days, and I've always taken my camera, since I had my first camera when I was about five or six.
So, lots of photos, lots of happy memories.
But sometimes an ordinary day out can turn, retrospectively, into a more important event than it seemed at the time.
Here's the Communist, having a good time walking at Bolton Abbey on February 18th, 2007, almost a year ago.
Whenever you pointed a camera at him when he was out, he always managed to look as though he owned the place. And, being a Communist, I suppose he would have done, given half a chance: though you would have had a share in it too. This was the Communist's last walk at Bolton Abbey, a place he's loved all his life. We may perhaps be able to take him back there for a visit sometime, but he won't be able to walk because he had his right leg amputated in October.
At the moment he's living in a nursing home, though is currently back in St James's Hospital because he fainted: they think he's anaemic. Of course, if they send him back to the nursing home, where the food is good, I think he'll stand a better chance of overcoming anaemia than he might eating hospital food.
So I look at this photo, and it's good to remember how much he enjoyed that day. But it makes me sad too. And I'm thinking hey, one day very, very many of my photos are going to have that effect on me.
posted by Daphne at 9:46 pm
2 Comments:
Damn you for making me cry!! Let's treasure those memories of happy times. Today a nurse asked me if my dad had treated me well because she couldn't understand why I spend so much time at the hospital and didn't think she would visit her dad so often if she was in my position. And of course my dad has treated me well. And I too look at the happy photos and they make me sad - like my dad's 85th birthday back in December, although of course it was significant then, it is even more important now.
That's the beauty of photographs though, we use them to keep fresh in our minds that which otherwise time would fade.
I have photographs I wouldn't trade for anything and would sooner give my right arm rather than lose.
New technologies do help, I've scanned most of my treasured photos, just in case they begin to deteriorate with time.
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