time, passing

This blog is fifteen years old today.  I'll leave you a moment to think about that: 6,373 consecutive days of taking a photograph, and writing something - even if only a sentence - and posting it.  

It started, of course, as a teaching-related exercise: I didn't think it right to ask my students in my "Writing and Photography" course to write a blog if I didn't have any experience of doing so myself.  I think I told them they need only write a couple of entries a week: I embarked on it as a daily exercise, and never looked back.  It's a strange way of keeping a public diary, because of course it's highly selective and self-censoring, but it's also very effective as a memory placeholder.  Memory, indeed, featured centrally in the course itself - I think I envisaged myself writing a book on photography and memory (hardly original as an idea ...) which then morphed into one on writing and photography, which then, in turn, morphed into Flash!  

But I'm still drawn back to that theme of memory, even if only at a personal, non-academic level.  I was ruffling around in a box of old photos in my office today and found this - which I don't, indeed, remember.  The fade-away on the right hand side seems the perfect visual analogue for recollections fading away ... and also, as a big-time imperfection, surely was the reason why this wasn't kept alongside the small, familiar collection that lived in a wooden box on the other side of the room from the window you see here.  I guess it's 1961: I'm wearing my new school uniform - I do remember my father posing me, presumably at the same session, on the house's doorstep - and there's Rama, barely visible, turning his big blue Siamese eyes towards me on the sitting room window ledge.

What I admire about my father's photographic skills is how he's used the lighting to make the room seem large and elegant.  We'd only moved in fairly recently (where and when did the curtains get sown?), and didn't have much money, didn't have much by way of furniture apart from what had been bought in junk shops up in Cumberland.  There's no sofa, no rug.  But it looks quiet, settled, idyllic.  It also looks, and was, a long time ago.