One for the family album

“WHO is that person who looks like Grandad but has lots of hair?”, my 7 year old asks.

“It IS Grandad! Just a long time ago!!” giggles my mum.

When my folks came to visit last week armed with a bag of our old family albums, they were greeted with initial indifference which was replaced quite quickly with intrigue and delight. There is nothing like spending a couple of hours leafing through the faded, sticky backed pages of your own family history.

“Look, there’s a little Uncle David ( now mid 40s ) in a really old England kit!” spotted my football loving middle son. “Mum, is that you???” (cue raucous laughter at my wonky fringe and height of fashion bowl cut)

No matter how many stories I tell from my childhood, I’m not sure my boys actually believe I was ever as young as them. But the yellowing pieces of photographic paper present the indisputable facts - we too had paddling pools, and birthday parties, and look, there’s me on my first day at high school (‘Were you nervous?’ asks my eldest who is nearing the end of Year 6).

There is no stronger link to our past, and no more valuable gift to our future than photographs, proper printed out photographs so that we can touch them, pore over them and pass them around.

Even though we take more photographs now than ever, we somehow value them less. You can’t hold a jpeg.

Let’s not lose the memories to cyberspace, or obsolete hard drives. We need photo albums, we need to print out the pictures and put them on our walls. And most importantly, we need to give our grandchildren the chance to point and laugh at our terrible 2018 hairstyles, and funny clothes.