scanning

At last, I'm getting round to scanning a whole lot of old slides - the idea (yes, I know it's already late November) is to put together some kind of iBook for my parents - largely pictures taken before I was, say, fourteen - and there are all kinds in the stash that I carried off (with permission) earlier in the year from Wimbledon.  And some make me cry - one of my father, when I was about eighteen months, and he was - what? - thirty two-ish.  And there are others that are of moments, or places, that I can't remember at all - they are the strangest, since many of them are, broadly speaking, familiar - and I've attached memories to them - because prints were made of them, or whatever.

And then there are some that have crept in from later years ... here I am, round about December 1980, designing my Christmas card for that year.  I wish I'd realized at the time that I'd look back thirty two years (really?  surely not?  really ...) later, and think that I was cute ... The most striking thing to me, however, is that this is BC - Before Computers.  It's not just that I'm drawing with a trusty Rotring pen - it's the Letraset sheets to my left.  Remember Letraset?  Did it exist in the US?  Kind of transfer letters, where one had to press hard on the back of a semi-translucent sheet, and hope that the black stuff didn't flake off, and that one had worked out the spacing properly beforehand ... I'm more than amused that the only really identifiable books on top of my desk are Terry Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology, and John Berger's About Looking, and Linda Nochlin's Realism.  And - look! - real live index cards.