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the beauty of the day - no. 4

 

Dear Sheddists,

today's beauty is a bitter-sweet thing - a series of photographs from an album I had long forgotten.

My father was a keen amateur photographer. I can remember as a small boy standing beside him in his make-shift dark-room, watching filmy paper dipped in chemicals take on shadows and form.  He died much too young and my mother instigated a Ground Zero cleansing of his pictures in response.

I managed to rescue just a few. Years later I made up an album and gave it to my mother the last time she spent Christmas with us.  There were photographs in it that were difficult. Photographs of my sister, Hilary who pedaled her cycle behind a bus in answer to her Godfather, our family doctor, waving to her from across the road. She never made it to the other side.

I gave her the album in a quiet room in our house on her own. There were tears. Twenty years on she was deep under the influence of morphine as I by sat by her side and listened to her relive those horrific moments as she sat in a ghostly hospital waiting-room to be told the news.

The album was tucked away at the back of her cupboard. She was about to throw it away and I rescued the photos once more.  I got out it out today to scan some photos for my elder brother and here they are, still covered in tears.

Yours as ever,

electrofried(mr)

the beauty of the day - No. 3

Dear Sheddists,

it's the start of my second year of retirement and it can't be put off any longer.  Our daughters insist we clear the loft in the upper tower at the House of electrofried. It currently plays host to a rich cornucopia of discarded family mementos lovingly assembled over the course of nearly three decades, but they profess little interest in sorting it out come their parents' ultimate demise.

We've resisted for many years on the basis it forms a useful layer of additional insulation to rebuff the frostiest tendrils of winter but the time has come. We don protective clothing, dig out the flash-lights and pull down the ladder.  History here we come!!

Our initial forays disgorge a library's worth of yellowing paperbacks, a selection of VHS video-tapes (anyone remember Joggy Bear and Lizzie?!), sundry dust-filled cardboard boxes of varying vintage and a pile of school photographs. It's among the last of these I retrieve the treasures copied below, two black and white photos of my parents...

Yours as ever,

electrofried(mr)