Sponsored Post: A picture is worth…

In less than a month, this blog will be 10 years old. Sometimes I look back at the very first posts, though I like doing it on the wayback machine most to get the full flavour of how it used to look. Somehow, to me, those early posts are not the same surrounded by the modern template. I like the atmosphere and nostalgia of how it was back then, in all those previous, hand cobbled incarnations of a webpage. I’m a visual person and the look is as important as the words.

Back 10 years ago, getting photos into a blog post was tricky indeed. Blogger couldn’t handle it, there was no Flickr and no Instagram or easy way to upload a picture. All my photos were stored on another website and painfully coded in, painfully extracted from a camera and edited, stored and retaken on early digital cameras that were less good by a considerable margin than my phone camera is now. It was normal to write a blog post without a photo, yet it is the photo posts I’m drawn back to; those little girl faces peering out at me, their childhood illustrated in weekly change and difference. I’m painfully aware that photos end up being the memories we are left with. My whole memory of Freddie’s life is contained in the photos I have. I don’t remember anything else.

I blog less these days of the day to day. That’s partly because I’m busy and we have a different life but it’s mostly due to what else is available. I still carry something like these canon cameras with me to main events, but I yearn for the day when Instagram is something you can do from them. I love the immediacy of communicating by photo, of capturing a moment, a timeline of images that I can look back at and recall, the opportunity to snap an image and have conversation with them. I really must learn to use Tumblr again actually, it’s perfect for the style that suits me now.

Yesterday I spent the day at work but came home, from a hot and bright school run, to the garden.

I could describe the joy of that two hours to you but a photo tells it so much better. I sat in the sun and I watched my little boy tootle about in the garden, being beautiful, learning about water and not pulling the leaf buds off his brother’s tree and the importance of gadgets that Daddy and Maddy use. And that ordinary moment in time, nothing special, will be something I always remember because of a photo.

Disclosure: I received payment for this post.