Musings of a Mediocre Mother
During my teenage years, through school, college and into my twenty’s, I wasn’t into taking pictures, a fact I now obviously regret as I don’t have the boxes of keepsakes that some of my friends do. It always seemed to be the same people snapping away, and who would then proudly bring in the developed items for us all to pore over. I was always super critical of any image of myself, thinking everyone else always looked great. Probably an indication of vanity that I would inspect my celluloid image so closely and ultimately avoided going in front of the camera because any photograph was, I felt, a poor representation of what I thought I saw in the mirror.
But do you remember the excitement of picking up your pictures from Boots? You normally had to wait at least a week to view the pictures you’d taken, many of which would have a sticker attached declaring the pictures of poor quality because they were blurred and everyone had red eyes. And it was so costly! Buying film and then developing it was hideously expensive. Even now, the cost of developing 36 pictures from film in Boots is about £7.50 compared with about £1.80 for digital.
I do admire people who have endless photos of family and friends on display, particularly fascinating if they include former acquaintances of my own. Often these are displayed in the loo where I then spend an inordinate amount of time looking at them all, only to emerge somewhat red-faced in case anyone thinks I’ve been in there so long doing something other than ‘a tinkle’. In one friends’ house, I was sitting there, looking at the photos, only to spot my former boss looking back at me. I hadn’t realised they knew each other, very disconcerting.
As a child, however, the story was completely different. I would happily pose away and the reels of grainy, black and white cine film that my father took, often show me performing for the camera. On one occasion, my father was obviously trying to get some film of my sister, a much shyer and quieter girl than me. He managed to capture her, centre stage, so to speak and on her own, then I appeared stage right, cartwheeling across the screen, between her and the camera, her face replaced by my knickers.
These days of course, we have the means to take endless photos which we can edit as we go along, although does anyone really then print them out? Or like us, do they sit on your camera/computer never to see the light of day again?
I’ve almost gone full circle on the photo front, and would like to appear in some pictures, particularly as they can be deleted if you can see every one of my considerable number of pounds. Perversely I’m quite often asked to move out of the shot by my husband so he can take a picture of ‘just the boys’. It would be nice to have a flattering image of myself to post on Facebook, again vanity but there you go. I thought I’d cracked it when we recently had a barrel of beer in the house for a party, an event that caused such excitement that he decided to take some pictures of it. Perhaps I could pose next to the barrel, I said, as I’d put a bit more effort into getting ready. The result would have been ok if only I’d checked the background. I appear to have a wall calendar growing out of the top of my head. I think Facebook will have to wait…
Mediocre Mother
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