An old friend of mine is having a sort out of photographs, digging through his past, and over the last few days he has sent me pictures reminding me where our paths have overlapped over the last 35 years we have known each other. I feature in his photos every now again - not a constant presence as we didn’t go to the same school, and both moved away from our hometown to go seek our fame and fortune elsewhere, but we always kept in touch as best as we could before the onset of mobile phones, social media and texting. We had a mutual group of friends – I was the new incomer - meeting them all through my then boyfriend. He, however had been to school with most of them and his history with some of them go back to primary days. Over the years, inevitably the group dynamics changed – friends leave, friends introduce new partners. Friends get married and have children. And some friends die.
There we are, in one faded photo – fresh baby faced 16-year olds, both crammed into a photo booth pulling silly faces with a friend of ours who is sadly no longer with us. And again, there we are on New Year’s Eve, a few years later, a group of us talking over each other around a table – I vaguely remember the evening but a couple of the faces I no longer recognize, blurred by time and memory. We appear again when I moved to London after college, delighted to find he was only a few Tube stops away. A few of us coincidentally ended up in the same part of town for a year or so and would meet quite regularly in the evenings, often dossing on each other’s sofas like the old days. And again, another image taken at our friend’s wedding – I must have been in my late 20s, we all had grown up a bit by then – buying flats and getting married, some of us having babies, but even so, I still can’t recognize the me that was back then, youthfully staring boldly out of the frame.
It feels strange to appear in someone else’s timeline. I have been prompted to start looking through my own photos – especially the ones taken pre-mobile phone or digital camera, the ones in albums and folders – a time where you had no real idea of the composition, the light or the quality of the photograph until you got the developed film back from the chemist. It sounds so old-fashioned now, but there was something about unwrapping the paper envelope and opening up the wallet from Boots the Chemist or Jessops, before shuffling through the 24 images you may have waited days to see. And in those images, captured by time, stuffed in an old chest I keep them all in - I’ve seen people who are strangers now but at the time meant the world to me. People dotted throughout my own timeline who only exist to me now in that image – some evoke an instant memory - people I haven’t thought about for probably 30 years until this week, and then there I am, with them again, giggling, dancing or bunking off lectures. Others have been constant – appearing over the years at weddings, big birthdays and annual BBQs, or most recently digitally raising a glass via our computer screens. All of those people though have meant a lot to me at some stage, enough to raise the camera and cherish the moment – to keep it all alive and re-visit over and over again, to capture them in my own history.
We spend so much time now looking through our phones, taking photos daily of literally everything, yet I bet we rarely file any away into albums to be dug out in years to come. I know I don’t. Probably more memories from the 30 odd photos I have looked at this week, than all the 8611 photos I have stored on my phone. Yes, I checked.
My friend has his reasons for collating his sentiments. He is gathering together an album of mutual memories for someone we both know who is very ill and may not be long for this world. It has been a tricky journey for him in recent years and I know this latest news is hitting him hard. Seeing photos of them all larking around as schoolboys, through the teen years and then recent ones of them all now, in their 50s, slightly balding and slightly broader - has hit me too. Whether that is because it is yet another reminder of our own vulnerability, or just the pure passing of time, I am not sure. I just know this week I have shed a tear for times and people past, wallowing in nostalgia, remembering yet again, the innocence of youth.
© The Real Tilly Fairfax
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