When I was at uni my room was covered in photos. A montage
of memories and a mash-up of friendship circles, nights out, gigs and camping
trips. Just looking at that wall used to cheer me up as I faced a glum deadline
or was missing friends who were on campuses at other ends of the country. It
was only when I recently transferred our holiday pics to my computer
that I realised with a strange feeling of guilt that my initial reaction to
dumping the files onto my Desktop was to then do a bulk upload to Facebook and
create a new album. Not entirely a bad thing, Facebook has become the place
where we dip in and out of each other’s lives with a swipe of the finger or a
double tap. Much better than an after-dinner slideshow presentation of various
angles of cactus plants or our beach buggy road trip.
But still.
I would rather my first reaction to be to order prints to be
delivered, archive them in a real touchy-feely, chunky album. Have it for years
to come on a shelf for a rainy Tuesday evening, to leaf through actual
photographs with inky scrawled writing on the back with names, dates, places
and exclamation marks. My parents’ house is teeming with photos, their kitchen
door is our wall of fame, from first steps and fancy dress, to graduation,
barbeques and birthdays. Each photo competing for space but each face beaming
or squinting into the sunlight, sometimes blurry where one of us moved before
the camera had snapped. Christmas jumpers and corduroys, dungarees and baggy
hoodies, wetsuits and Easter bonnets, mark our family’s history and I love
soaking it in whenever I’m home.
In those years down the lane I want my future children to
inherit tomes of our travels and have that shared experience of crowding around
a sofa and laughing at haircuts and board shorts. I don’t want them to inherit
passwords and security questions and number of likes.
So that’s that. I’ve ordered prints and I’m making an album
and I’ve made myself a little oath to not rely on a digital wall but to
actually make these happy times and small moments of blissful light actual real
physical things, on bookshelves and mantelpieces.
