Monday 12 October 2009

Embarassment

In my study I have an album of photos from my childhood. They were given to me on my 40th birthday by my mum. In her infinite wisdom, she decided to bring them along to my birthday party and show them to all my friends. As all my friends were under the influence of copious quantities of booze they all thought them hysterically funny.

There were pictures of me naked on a hillside when I was about 2 or 3. Pictures of me through my school years. Pictures of me... Never mind, I think you get the idea. They were the sort of photo that gets dragged out when the new girlfriend/ boyfriend finally gets to meet the parents.

But there are only about 30 or 40 of them. That was the beauty of the analogue age. When cameras needed to be filled with a film and then, when the photos were taken, had to taken to the chemist and developed. All at a cost.

Now in the digital age everybody has a digital camera that takes no film and needs no developing. Pictures can be taken willy nilly and downloaded onto the family computer, uploaded to Myfacebookspace or whatever. I have just become a granddad, well, a month ago anyway, and I already have somewhere in the region of 500 pictures of my granddaughter on my laptop. Can you imagine how ,long it is going to take to show all these, and the rest that we take over the years, to new love interest when she gets older. Maybe we ought to give her business cards with the URL of where they are stored online and the message “ carry on without me and let me know when you are finished”

2 comments:

  1. A quick calculation says that if you carry on at the same rate then you'll have nearly 400,000 over a lifetime (conveniently ignoring the fact that you'd have to live to the age of a Galapagos turtle to see them).

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  2. I'd better put the kettle on, then.

    ReplyDelete