Hey I was an Artist and Forgot!

The Diggle Hotel August 1983

Its strange how the older I get the less time I have to do things I want to do. Many of my friends have now retired and the first thing they tell me is that they don’t know how they found time to work.

Thats very reassuring to know, I will be sure to remember that the next time I am steaming towards another almost impossible deadline at work.

I am on holiday this week for four days  and we decided to have a bit of a de-clutter, Now if your home is anything like ours it is normally Ann who does the de-cluttering which means I normally lose about fifty percent of my treasured items.

This time though we are looking at emptying cupboards and drawers of all the things we think will come in handy one day but in reality we will never need or use. It was while I was looking in the back of my wardrobe (I call it my wardrobe but in reality Ann’s stuff takes up at least half of it) I found a box of old family photographs which stopped me dead in my tracks and we lost a couple of hours looking back at what is essentially my family history.

Its quite emotional and uplifting at the same time. I was reminded that my parents were young once, what my grandparents looked like and I never looked as cool as I thought I was. It is always a good idea to do this even if it’s only to remind you of long lost times and to see were you came from and were your roots lie.

I am at that age were once I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw my father looking back at me, after looking at these photographs I realise I need to rethink that proposition and realise it is now my grandfather. I also forgot what I looked like with a full head of brown hair rather than the grey remnants of my hairline that exist today.

In the bottom of the box I found a Pen and Ink drawing that I did when we first moved into the village, a pastime I used to enjoy and would spend hours doing. Its strange I forgot how much I used to enjoy doing this because in the interceding twenty years it slipped out of my memory totally.

So now our house is a little less cluttered, but I cant tell because I couldn’t see any of it in the first place but more importantly I found evidence of all the important things that my parents thought were milestones in their children’s lives, because I found most of mine.

My first birthday, my pram, my first school uniform, my first bicycle, the arrival of my brother and so it goes. Most in black and white and some in colour all found in a brown cardboard box taken from my parents home after they died over thirty years ago.

Today I got up and thought to myself how families have changed over the years. We are no longer the tight knit groups of people who lived around the corner from each other. and often we only meet up at weddings and funerals. It’s not that we are any less close but time flies by and before you know it you haven’t seen each other for more years that you care to remember and in some cases its too late.

So my mission this year is to catch up with some of the people on the photographs and make a point of meeting up with them (obviously the living ones, I can catch up with the rest later on) . Its given me something to think about other than work and according to Ann thats got to be a good thing.

You never know I may start drawing again that is if Ann doesn’t find me another load of jobs for the rest of the holiday.