I’ve spent a good chunk of the weekend systematically digitising a stack of old photographs, from my time at college in Western Canada. In the process of doing this, I have learnt several things.

1. Bad Hair
   Whoever told me I ought to get a perm was really very wrong indeed. I ended up looking as if should be wearing leather trousers and singing shouting in a soft-rock band. Even though this was the (very) early nineties, this was still inexcusable.

2. People Pictures
   I took a lot more people pictures back then than I do now. That’s possibly because there were more people in my everyday life back then.

   I know this might seem like an odd thing to say, living and working in the heart of a gigantic city, working in a building with five full floors, and with packed commutes twice a day.

   But I don’t mean those kinds of people - the peripheral people who happen to share your existance on the bus, in the coffee shop, next to the photocopier, in a meeting room. Back then, at a college of two hundred people on a small, wooded campus on the coast of Vancouver Island, those two hundred people were my everyday life.

   They were my friends, my room-mates, my fellow Physics-haters, my lunch dates, my kayak buddies, my classmates, my study partners, my random late night coffee on the deck outside the common room allies. They were my world.

   No wonder I had so many pictures of people - and not just people I saw and snapped - people I knew and loved and loathed (and loved then loathed, or vice versa in some cases) on an everyday basis. I took it all for granted back then, flung suddenly from innner London to a campus beneath towering trees, where two hundred students became family - with all associated joys and problems.

   Now they’re all over the world - or in some cases, just down the road - and nearly fifteen years have passed. It’s weird, is all.

3. Super, Natural, British Columbia
   Canada is just gorgeous. Really. All those towering trees and rocky shorelines. It’s like the West of Scotland on steroids.

   I lived in B.C. for two years, and explored a little by bus, by boat, on foot and in a kayak, but totally took for granted that I was living in one of the most breathtakingly gorgeous bits of the world. This totally sharpens my resolve to get out there in 2005 with P, possibly for our long-awaited honeymoon. And this time with a better camera.

4. Surprise!
   I’ve got this certain picture of me and an friend (who shall remain nameless). We’d just finished painting a mural on the common room wall, and we are sitting looking proud and paint-spattered on top of a piano in front of it. Now, I’ve had this picture for fourteen years, and it’s pretty small. Hold your thumb and forefinger about 3 inches apart. It’s about that big. So, pretty tiny, really.

   Anyway, today, in the process of scanning it, I discovered a detail in the photograph that I hadn’t previously noticed. See, the scanner automagically scans at large scale and high res. And so when I opened up the scanned image, imagine my surprise to discover that the white splodge between his legs that I’d previously noticed on the photo wasn’t, in fact, a blob of paint, but was in fact his underwear, peeking through a hole in his crotch. And then picture my further surprise when I spotted an unmistakeable shadowy bollock, peeking out alongside. Niiiice.

   If you really want to see this picture (Why? Why?) here you go. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

   Please note you can also see here a perfect example of my terrible perm. I also appear to be wearing a lumberjack shirt. Contrary to what the Monty Python crew might have you believe, that’s not OK.

   Also, please note that his face wasn’t like that all the time - even though I haven’t been in touch with him for over thirteen years, it’s only fair to conceal his identity. If he did look like that all the time, I think people would be more likely to stare at his freakish face than his dangling nads.

5. Hello?
   The not-so-great thing about digitising pictures is that you inevitably end up in great swathes of reminiscence, such as to cause you to spend hours googling your old classmates. Why aren’t any of them online as more than just vague passing references, dammit? Is no-one wired these days?

Some of the pictures I’ve been digitising will appear in the images section of this site. There’s one there already, in fact….