... and that leads me on to; Cameras.

I realised that while doing the last post, I still have the cameras that those pictures were taken with.

Both of the cameras were, although nominally, family cameras, it was mostly Dad who used them. Very occasionally, Mam would be entrusted with taking a photo if it was required that Dad was in the picture.

I can remember the first time I was allowed to take a picture. It would have been 1976 and we were on holiday in London. The obligatory trip to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard saw me shoved to the front of the crown and a disembodied arm followed me, This arm shoved the camera into my hand and I took a photo of the approaching Welsh Guards.

I don't have the actual photograph but I do recall scanning it but can't now find the scanned pic.

It may have been for my birthday that year, or maybe the following year, that Mark, my brother, bought me a camera for my birthday. It was a Polaroid Land Camera.

This huge big thing used film which came in a box like cartridge and only took nine pictures. Once taken, the picture had to be pulled out of the side of the camera then left for a few minutes before removing the covering film. If you hesitated even slightly in pulling, you would be left with a white line down the middle of your photo. Likewise if you left the backing film on to long the photo would be black or if taken off to quickly, the photo would be white. I never got the opportunity to spoil many photo's as my pocket money didn't often stretch to buying the film.

This camera always languished in the bottom of my wardrobe and it was not until recent years that I took it out of it's box to discover that I'd left the batteries in that last time I'd used it and the whole thing had turned into a green chemical smelling lump.

It was many years before I owned another camera and I had this one stolen in a burglary.

I now swap and change between three different cameras, depending upon where I am or what I'm doing. My skill at photography is still crap, but I try.

Like me, my Dad kept his first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie. It was made some time around 1947 and he came by it because he swapped it for 2lbs of sugar.

I don't know if he bought his next, and final camera, a Kodak Brownie 127, but he kept it too. I have them both.

Apparently, it is still possible to get films for these two cameras so I must give them a go. I suppose that if I do, I will be in the same boat as my Dad. When he used the camera, picture taking was an event in its own right, film being expensive and not to be wasted. This is diametrically opposed to digital photography. My Olympus, on which the photo below is taken on has a 4gig memory card. I can blast away with impunity. That wouldn't have done for Dad.

My Dad's cameras in the middle.

# Holidays are coming, Holidays are coming

Holidays are coming but I'm not thinking in terms of the Coke advertisement. I'm thinking of somewhere warm and sunny with lots of cute little Hispanic boys. Cuba, for instance. Cuba was good last time, it could be better this because I don't have to drag David along.

Holidays weren't always like that though. There was a time when it was very much like the Coke ads.
Most of our family holidays were spent at Bridlington or Scarborough. I remember them fondly but, some years ago I thought I'd scan the family snaps [I knew that my oldest brother would snaffle them away and they would be lost forever]. Looking at the pics, and they range over quite a lot of years, the one outstanding feature is of how cold it must have been. There isn't one shot of anybody looking remotely sunburned or even comfortably warm. Jumpers abounded.
The chill was generally offset by a huge steaming pot jug of tea, purchased from a stall on the promenade. Tea, the strength of which, would be enough to bring the glaze off of the inside of the jug. Mam would always have made up a parcel of sandwiches the chief ingredient of which would be sand. I don't ever recall her keeping much sand in the pantry at home so it must have made its way into the parcels while on the beach.
Anyway, while scanning through my photo's, I thought I'd post a few of them here.

Paternal grandparents with me in the middle. Hats, coats and jumpers much in evidence.

Evidence of sunshine on the east coast!. It must be slightly warmer than the norm because both grandads have taken their jackets off. This is the only pic I have of all of my grandparents together.

Dad and Aunts Nell & Dot. Nelly looks frozen, Dot had the foresight to put a thick jumper on.

John, Frank, Mark, Mam & Dad. Despite being on the "beach", it must have been cold enough even to have kept shoes on!

Taken, apparently, at Brid [so it said on the back of the photo] and possibly the only photograph in existence of my brother John with a smile on his face. It must be because he is in the presence of one of his own species. Notice that they are all wearing their school uniform. Good old St Theresa's.

.... and that brings me on to... the Alan Bennett moment.

I like Alan Bennett. He's become a bit of a "National Treasure"recently but his writing hasn't suffered for that. My Mam liked Alan Bennett too. On one of my periodic visits, I had in the car one of the Talking Heads series of monologues, the one that includes A Lady of Letters, performed by Patricia Routledge.
The gist of it is, she's a frustrated spinster who gets her kicks by writing poison pen letters. Anyway, she's come home after having gone out to post another letter and had just finished reading the newspaper; "I've read the Evening Post," and before the next line came out my Mam followed it up with "There's nowt in it". Low and behold this is the next line in the speech.
Now I knew this, having heard the play before. Mam had never heard it. But, Mr Bennett, being a Leeds lad and writing about what he knows, voices his characters with the idiom with which he grew up.
"There's nowt in it" must be uttered in thousands of homes across Leeds every evening. It's even said in this house and I read the bloody thing on line!

Packing away family history.

I should have posted this the other day but got into doing something else instead.

One of the few things I inherited from my Mum was the box of Christmas decorations. They're nothing special, just common or garden wassailing balls. I think I'd better explain the difference. Christmas decorations were things like tinsel, holly and strings of Christmas cards. The decorations hanging on the tree were always known as wassailing balls.

Anyway, they lived in a tin which, itself, lived on top of the wardrobe in the spare room [and the wardrobe was called the "Tallboy" and the spare room was "the box room". The tallboy was a very small short wardrobe and the only box that the box room contained was the box of wassailing balls. All very confusing, I know]. I'd never thought about it until recently, but the contents of the box and the box itself were quite a chunk of family history.

All the balls in the tin are exactly the same as I always remember them. I don't recall any new ones ever being bought to replace the occasional broken ones. Bearing in mind that they are glass, and very delicate, and that fact that there are so many of them, is a bit of a miracle [the picture shows only a very few of them]. There are lots of different shapes, bells [that actually tinkle] trumpets, horns, fruits and many other shapes. The box also contains a couple of rolls of ribbon on which the Christmas cards were hung and a matchbox [itself very old, and bearing a design which I don't ever recall seeing, other than in the tin] which holds the minute clothes peg type things for fastening the Christmas cards to the ribbons.

Typical of Mam, the bottom of the box is lined with a folded sheet of newspaper. Now, I'm sure that I've seen this piece of paper lots of times, well, since I was old enough to decorate the Christmas tree, but I'd never taken it out of the tin until last Sunday night.

It's a page from the Yorkshire Evening Post, January 5th 1966. That's about a year and three weeks after I was born.

So, the sheet of paper is the only thing that I can date with any certainty. My eldest brother says that he can only ever remember the same wassailing balls in the same tin and he's well into his fifties. Mam and Dad aren't here anymore so I cant ask them. I'm beginning to wonder if they did buy the wassailing balls new or if the got them from somewhere else [grandma Phillips had very similar one's but had very few of them, so possibly, Mam got them from her mother]. I know that they didn't get the tin from new. Mam & Dad were never very big on potato crisps and there is no way they would have bought them in bulk, and before bags of crisps came in [cardboard] boxes of 48, they seem to have come in tins of 18. Now, I'll never know anything about the contents of the tin other than that when they were packed away in the new year of 1966, Mam, and it would have been Mam, lined, or maybe even relined, the tin with a page from the evening paper. I can be certain though that in 1966, the Yorkshire Evening Post still printed the same rubbish that it does to this very day.

Addendum; In a break with tradition,I've added something new to the box. The Santa Claus Russian doll. I bought it in a junk fair [I collect Russian dolls] and this one will, from now on, live in the tin with the wassailing balls. As it's not new, and it's not a replacement, it's not that much of a break with any tradition.