More Cake?
Digital photography is a wonderful development - you can take endless pictures and it doesn't matter if they come out blurred, or crap, because you can delete them at no cost. In fact you can probably tell if a picture is crap the moment it's taken, and can therefore retake it if necessary. However at some point you have to print out the ones you want to keep; if you are one of those dull and organized people you can arrange them chronologically in albums, but for the rest of us there's the old standby - a shoebox with assorted paper wallets of old photos in no particular order, shoved on a high shelf in a cupboard. This can then serve as a kind of time-capsule since it will be years until you look in it. The fact that nothing is in any order means that you have to wade through several piles of photos before you find the one you wanted, and this allows you to relive memories that you hadn't planned on, which is invariably the best way.
Anyone who seriously believes that they'll stumble on a folder of old electronic pictures buried in My Documents five years from now and will enjoy clicking on the thumbnails is clearly a twat with a technology fetish.
Mrs Bison started sorting through old photos this evening because of novelty cake picture accompanying Jaggy's birthday post. She used to like making strange birthday cakes for me, back in the day, and she wanted to dig out a couple of pictures immortalizing the "Sid the Sexist" one, or the unforgettable "Penis and Testicles" cake. In the process she rediscovered loads of photos from our earlier days together, which generated various reactions, such as:
- Wasn't it great when we bought our first house? But wasn't the kitchen tiny, ugly and shite?
- Why has hair apparently disappeared from my eyebrows but sprouted just about everywhere else?
- Why did I sometimes dress like a cunt? (Not literally, in case you're imagining some kind of twisted fancy dress outfit...)
- Who was that wrinkle-free future-wife, and what happened?
- I wonder whether that fence I built is still there.
- Why was I showing my arse to the camera on a cold beach somewhere, possibly Brightlingsea?
- That home-made Christmas dinner looks great, but whay didn't we change the fucking awful wallpaper in that dining room?
- Was it really worth spending half a day with a spinning rod on some rocks in South Wales, just to catch two scrawny mackerel? (Answer - of course it was.)
- Whatever happened to paisley ties?
In a few years time I'll be as old as my Dad was when I left home. I don't have any photos of him from back then (I've never owned a camera in my life) but whether he looked older than me now or not, there's no question in my mind that he seemed more "grown-up". It has been written that "most men never reach any recognizable state of maturity but some of them learn to fake it". I don't know if my old man was faking, but if he was he did a bloody good job; I still don't feel as grown up now, at 40 years old, as he was when he must have been twenty five. Being a parent doesn't help - sometimes I feel like I'm this giant fraud, pretending to be an adult when in reality I have the natural manners, sophistication and humor of a college kid. I've had this discussion with a friend at work and he feels the same way about his old man. Either this generation is "lighter" and less grown-up than our parents or they did a wonderful job of hiding it.
I certainly don't imagine for one moment that Bison Daughter will be writing something similar about us twenty years from now. For a start she saw that photo of me at Brightlingsea, and the Sid the Sexist cake, so there's no point us pretending that we're your classic mature, responsible adults now is there? My Dad took all his photos as slides and we'd occasionally get slide shows of old pictures. I think I'd have remembered if there was one of him mooning the camera in his stripy swimming trunks at Camber Sands in 1971. Unless I blanked it out of course, but I have a feeling things were different then. For a start he'd probably not have got it developed, and that's another feature of digital photography: no censorship. Plus you can photoshop your balls to be the size of oranges. And the color, too, if you'd like. Yes, it's a wonderful modern world in which we live.
Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison
posted by Mr Bison at
6:26 PM
1 Comments:
I was a big fan of Sid the Sexist, bought the T-shirt and the video.
There was always a bit of suspense when we used to take a slightly risque conventional photo, once it was snapped, and on the film, there was nothing you could do. You had to wait, months sometimes, before that roll of film was developed to see if the chemist had processed it or taken it out for being obscene.
Another thing about old film cameras is that you very often forgot about what pictures were taken, particularly of boozy parties or holidays, and again, by the time you waited until the roll was finished and then developed it always led to "fuck me, I can't remember doing that!"
With modern digitals, convenience has taken away the suspense. I suppose it's a trade off for being able to delete the ones you'd rather forget about.
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