Digital Camera

I gave my wife a digital camera for her birthday just a few weeks ago and it has disrupted our usually precise routine.



She seems determined to record our every waking moment and so now all of our tasks take twice as long. I am not sure whether this new obsession is an age related thing because, as I feel the need to point out, I am three weeks younger than Mrs M.



It is not just the taking of pictures that has added years to every minute but the additional process now required to make use of the images.



There was a time when a 24 frame film was consumed out of a sense of duty, full in the knowledge of the fact that at least 20 shots would be discarded as virtually useless. Only after the full roll has sat on your shelf for several months will you get around to dropping it in for developing.



Now, with the advancement of digital photography, we are faced with the frightening prospect of every shot being placed on view electronically. Needless to say I am somewhat concerned; I don't have the physiology to allow for too many pictures to be taken with any confidence.



In the days of film there was the natural censorship of the cost of developing at the back of your mind. The picture taker would have had the good grace to at least wait for you to smile and breath-in before pressing the button. Now they just take shot after shot without any care, safe in the knowledge that they can, in theory, erase them later.



Once my bride has filled up a storage disk with pics she is ready to download them onto the computer. I say she is ready when what I actually mean is she is waiting to be shown how to do it for the umpteenth time.



Invariable we cannot remember where we have put the connecting wire even though we have a special drawer for such things. Several minutes and many arguments later we sit down to press all the correct buttons in the right order so that our memories can be stored.



Once this part of the process is complete my wife then wishes to 'Facebook' them (she cares nothing about turning nouns into verbs) and so the logging on to the internet and uploading fun begins.



This is probably the area of digital photography that causes me both the most pleasure and the most pain. There are pictures of me on the world wide web in poses that should not be seen: part way through eating a pie on a day out, half asleep on a deck chair, looking petrified on the Manchester Eye, and spilling decent red wine down my shirt on a night out in Saltaire. Added to these are the numerous shots of me mouthing the words 'Don't take another picture!' I am usually caught mid way through the 'O' of another and looking like a slightly disappointed baboon.

The delight comes in laughing at my many friends who have been caught in similar positions by their partners.



At least my wife can take a decently framed photo. I, on the other hand, produce snaps with the edge of my finger appearing like a shadow in the top left hand corner; I like to make my mark.



So digital photography has removed from our language words and phrases like negative, developing, over exposed, and photograph album. And replaced them with ‘where did you put the wire?’, ‘You should have cleared your old pics off the disc by now’, ‘Could no-one be bothered to charge the battery up’ and ‘why did you put that one on Facebook’.



My wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday when I reach the same age in three weeks time and I am pretty sure that I don’t want a digital camera; one pictorial historian in the family is enough I think.



Mrs M doesn’t seem phased that I have named her such, she just points out that if history is written by the victors then all the power lies with those who own a digital camera.

Sayings

In a recent quiz we were challenged to think of twenty well known proverbs; fine you might think! If we weren’t under the pressure of having to come up with them to save our team’s honour against other collections of humanity it would be fine. As it was we were struggling big time.



We could come up with three straight away and then all went blank. I don’t want to blame age as a the main cause of our unfruitfulness but it does seem to be a recurring theme these days as we rush our way towards fifty not out. The memory loss is one thing but the propensity to be easily distracted is another.



Our first two proverbs caused me the most problem in this respect. ‘Two many cooks spoil the broth’ and ‘Many hands make light work’. I couldn’t help pondering how such seemingly simplistic proverbs could be so diametrically opposed. With these two sayings we are faced with a serious problem when it comes to soup making; either we suffer the consequence of having too much staff in the kitchen and consume sub-standard minestrone, or we find it to be such hard work due to lack of help that we become too exhausted to eat it.



When we finally got going with our quiz answers we were faced with other contradictory problems. How am I supposed to believe that I am ‘never to old to learn’ if at the same time it is impossible to ‘teach an old dog new tricks’. This never seemed to be problem when I was younger but now it has a certain poignancy.



When I was in my twenties I was happy to try new things living by the spirit of the youthful saying ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’. Now, however, it appears that the power of this saying has been reduced by the fact that is ‘better to be safe than sorry’.



I turned to my team mates and asked them if they felt a similar amount of confusion at this point; after all we were joined together because we had much in common, as if confirming the truism ‘birds of a feather flock together’. Nobody else shared my concern leaving me to feel slightly excluded until one of our group pointed out that ‘opposites attract’; thus proving my point. I think perhaps I am at the age where I should make up my own proverbs that fit with my midlife status. Try these:



‘Whatever hair you lose on you head grows in your ears and nose’



‘If it is not on the shopping list it doesn’t get bought’



‘Pastry can only be eaten once a week’



‘If you wear that style of clothes long enough it will eventually come back in fashion’



This one is important because after all ‘clothes maketh the man’ although, come to think of it you shouldn’t ‘judge a book by its cover’ so it doesn’t matter after all. Confused! I think we should let sleeping dogs lie.

Weather

Its all been a bit gloomy on the news over recent weeks and it is quite tempting to stop watching so that you are not faced with depressing pictures. I am, rather unwisely, partial to a spot of burying my head in the sand.


The problem with this approach is that you can easily miss things that you might want to see. I have developed a cunning method for deciding whether to hit the off button during the bulletin. It involves listening to the news readers tone as they introduce the piece. If they start in a bright ‘it feels like a Friday afternoon’ voice then you know that they will be talking about fluffy subjects like abseiling vicars and celebrities doing charity work.


If, however, they begin to talk in sombre tones it is sure sign that trouble is brewing.


It is the same principle as being able to guess the score of the football match as the reporter reads the results on a Saturday afternoon.


I had hoped that I might be able to transfer this new found skill to watching the weather report but the presenters are not as helpful in this respect.


They must be trained to speak in an ‘I have the best job in the world’ kind of voice no matter what the weather conditions. Smiling, almost smugly, they announce that storms will be covering the country.


I don’t mind them being happy when it is going to be sunny but do they have to enjoy telling us to expect grey skies and showers.


Thinking about the summer we have just missed out on perhaps they have had to try and over compensate in order to keep us watching.


Some years ago when Michael Fish brought us news of the climate he would do so in a fully professional way only offering us an occasional smile or chuckle when asked if a hurricane was about to hit our shores. He was more understated, of course, when he came on our screens to apologise later that same week.


You have to feel slightly sorry for weather men and women when it comes to presenting the forecast especially when you consider the last few months.


My father-in-law, with his eighty-eight years of experience refuses to trust them because for years he compared the picture on the screen with the summer view he experienced on his holidays.


Every year he would ring up from a caravan site in Cornwall to tell us that ‘it is glorious sunshine’ and for us not to believe the big black cloud depicted on the map just after the news that evening.


‘They just read it off a piece of paper’ he would say in his broad northern accent as if to imply that they knew nothing and were being fed lines.

I can always tell what he is going to say as soon as I answer the phone and here his very positive voice declaring ‘its sun shining here!’


I wonder if they need any eighty-eight year old weather forecasters.