Blurry

The Jewish comedian Jackie Mason used to say that the Jews don't do technical things and, from the evidence of extensive observation and research carried out over many years in the Jews I know well, I'd say that's true.

Of course, it's not a very wide pool of research subjects, consisting mostly of the Communist, and some of me, since I'm half-Jewish.

The Communist was very strong and very good at anything that required a bit of brute strength. He was very good at building anything that needed to be solid and to withstand a hurricane, or a comet landing, should there ever be any hurricanes or comets in this part of Leeds. If such a thing ever happened, the whole area might be completely flat, but you'd be able to identify our house by the bird table that the Communist build in the garden, which would still be standing perfectly upright.

But the Communist didn't do anything technical, and neither does my non-Jewish mother (as a kind of a control for the sample).

So - and I digress momentarily - is it any wonder that I can only learn one new button a year? And don't you think it's unnecessarily cruel to mock me for something that's clearly genetic?

To continue. I love taking photographs, as you know, and I love it so much that I'm even prepared to master some technical things about cameras. Not many, granted, but I've been working on it for a lot of years and so I've learned a thing or two, like how to press the thing that goes click halfway down to focus it first.

My parents never really mastered that focusing thing. Even with a camera where the focusing was automatic, they never quite got it. The Communist used to yell helpfully at my mother "You need to hold the camera STILL!" and it was true, he, himself did know to do that - - quite often with a finger or two in front of it. My mother didn't - still doesn't really - understand about holding the camera still. Or about pointing it fairly accurately in the direction of the thing you're trying to take photos of.

I shouldn't malign her because she's always telling me how great my photos are. However, it was only this morning, looking through lots of old photos, that I realised that her definition of "great" means "with the head actually in the picture and no thumb in front of the camera". With sad resignation I noticed that she doesn't even mean "in focus". She doesn't mind that slightly blurred look because she thinks all photos are like that - - and let's face it, when she's taken them, they are.

For Christmas my brother and I gave my mother one of those electronic photo frames which does a slideshow of photographs. She loved it, though gave another demonstration along the way of that other thing that my family has always done: which is, as soon as something doesn't work properly, it stays that way forever.

So, for example, once the battery went flat on our transistor radio, that was it: we no longer had a transistor radio. So Stephen put the photos on the frame but hadn't had a chance to turn them round, so some of them were horizontal rather than vertical.

"Don't faff with it," said my mother, "it's fine. We can just turn our heads sideways."

So we looked at lots of her recent photos of the garden in summer, where we saw some slightly blurry flowers in pretty colours, and of her recent trip to Tenby, where we saw some horizontal blurry people in front of a horizontal blurry Christmas tree, accompanied by my Mum's commentary. "Look, that's Roger! You can see nearly half of his head."

It was a great success. She can work it. She loves it. She's eighty-four and she's never going to learn how to take photographs that are in focus and are of the thing that she's trying to look at. But it really doesn't matter.