bd db

I remember a little of my first days of school.  At the time the school had a navy uniform and a blue shirt with a tie.  It was only a short distance from my house, brown and yellow in colour.

I remember my mother had sent me for a few days around April before  I was to begin school for real in September.  I remember sitting at a little yellow table adjacent to the teacher's desk.  I think she gave me mostly colouring activities.

When September finally came I remember being excited.  My older brother and sister were already at the school.  I was shy but I liked meeting new people, maybe that much hasn't changed, and I enjoyed the creative element of school.  I loved arts and crafts.

I remember the jumbo duplo bricks and my many efforts to construct a stable multi-coloured wall or houses and buildings of various shapes and sizes but predominantly of rectangular structure.  Play dough and plasticine were always good fun, finger paintings of dinosaurs and the many animals we made out of the infinitely versatile paper plate.  There were collages too, we were busied ourselves rolling little balls of crepe paper and dipping them in glue roaring, 'Rip and roll!'.  We were rockstars.

I had forgotten but I remember now how I used to confuse my 'b' and 'd' when learning to write.  I am not sure how or why but I suppose when a pen was placed between my finger and my thumb it raced forward delighting in the curves and swirls.  Sometimes the characters swelled to gigantic proportions breaking the linear blue lines of the page.  I can still remember my grossly disproportionate letters that grew and shrunk despite my concentration.  In the end, I had to be forced from my 'd' 'b' habit by a firm and rigid hand that gripped by left hand and pressed the loop in the right direction.  Soon, my 'b' and 'd' were as exactly as they should have been.

I remember the yellow covered copy books.   My six classmates and I beginning our adventure in literacy.  

We read stories, sometimes four whole lines in one night and our teacher gave us a 'word box'.  We used the word box to collect new words.  Mine was red with a yellow dot in the centre of the lid.  We had a spelling test every Friday and I strived for that gold star and 'excellent' mark of approval.  It seems silly now but 'very good' or worse yet 'good' was bitterly disappointing.

Outside we played Tag, boys after girls, girls after boys.  There were lots of scraped knees, salty tears and snotty noses.  We played at the front of the school.  The backyard was for the big kids and was somewhere foreboding and almost always terrifying.  The big kids cursed and swore.  

We had nature walks, a nature table and themed study weeks.  I remember learning about dinosaurs and being appalled by the sparse details delivered by the teacher.

It was an interesting times, a world of wonder, awe and learning.   We learned about the world and we learned to get along, mostly.  We learned no one likes a 'tell-tale' and that working diligently brought rewards.  Those gold stars,  pressed against the page with sticky tape, were sought after.

In-disposable Memories

Disposable images.
Copies and copies and slight variations of a scene.  Posed and altered and photo-shopped, cropped and flipped until the image is morphed into the memory we wanted.  Many of these end up in a digital recycle bin or in the dark recesses of social networks.
The chance that was once involved in a photograph is gone.
That viewfinder was a window of possibility but elusive certainty.

Now, we strive for counterfeit perfection.
A veneer, a wallpaper, a coat of paint and the reality of what once was, is altered.

Oh, gone are the days of stepping into the light before taking a picture, the crooked shots, the red eye, the missing limbs but also that feeling of anticipation, excitement and finally accomplishment having taken a beautiful photograph.

A few weeks ago I met some friends on a night out.
They had come into possession of a good old fashioned camera.  It took black and white images on film.
It was such an oddity.  They had taken it to someone in the know and asked if the camera was still fully functional.  Having been reassured that it was, they took this piece of antique equipment out on the town to capture a moment in time.  A moment daubed in tones of black, grey and white, dull and clear at the same time.

The capacity of this little box of memories was 12 shots.
Twelve scenes immortalised in shades of black and white.
No dizzying mega-pixels or intense colour enhancers.
Only a window that offered a possible future snap of a soon to be past event.  No room to doctor or alter it, that jagged wheel winded tensing the hammer as it waited to fly, pounding out this dent in a string of events.

We took photographs and asked other punters to join our mission.
The heavy camera brought a smile to several faces as they reminisced about their youth, old cameras and film and family photos and developing rooms.  It was an art.  Now, the art is fabrication.


Countless photographs fly by our newsfeed, sometimes we afford a 'like' or 'share'.  But these images slip into obscurity, occasionally resurrected but ultimately they pale in comparison to the dusty excitement of pulling out a photo album, the tenderness of holding a picture in your hands and kissing the image of your sweetheart goodnight. There is an insurmountable distance between us and those images buzzing on our computer screens, they'll never be as intimate as those memories painstakingly developed and stored in bulky folders.  They'll never offer the same reassurance as an in-disposable memory captured on film.