Step forward a few years. Hatty's 6th birthday. Hatty's first camera. If I'd had one of these in the mid-70's I would undoubtedly have been the next Almodovar. What a waste of my burgeoning, mercurial talent.
I remember my first camera. A 110mm Kodak thingy that was as cool as: I think it might well have been one of these. A film cost about a day's wages, developing it twice as much. It produced nasty, blurry snaps from its fixed-focus lens but hey, it's all there was. Step forward a few years. Hatty's 6th birthday. Hatty's first camera. If I'd had one of these in the mid-70's I would undoubtedly have been the next Almodovar. What a waste of my burgeoning, mercurial talent. Of course, the problem with giving such a devastating handful of technology to a 6-year old is that they have no concept of data-storage. Hatty is turning out 500MB a day... 'Oh No... the batteries have run out...'
All too rarely - but every now and then - someone comes up with a video-game concept that is entirely new. Portal was about as entirely new as it could get and quite brilliant for a bit of lateral thinking. On the basis that you may not know what I'm wibbling about... this was Valve's original promo-video: Why am I writing about it now? Because I've just stumbled across some guys playing it in real-life... ... is how it started. We were having Sunday dinner (roast lamb done in time-honoured garlic and rosemary style, thanks for asking), the laptop was within reach, the girls were at the 'just two more forks of vegetables and then you can have some dessert' stage... I felt unerringly compelled to demonstrate the true meaning of the word. And, to adults of a certain age, 'Indestructible' has a resonance that it'll likely retain to the end of our days. Teenagers can stop reading now - you have to be in your forties to have any idea what this particular slice of wibbling is about.
And obviously that was quite enough Scarlet for one Sunday evening. Because Youtube does that really annoying thing at the end of each video, presenting you with related clips, tempting you to lose yourself in tears of nostalgia AND the will to live at one and the same time. I barely made it back to 2012. Do I feel compelled to share with you the most exciting moments of my life c1970? I'm afraid I do...
Then, of course, we moved onto 'The Staying Up Nights'... To Be Continued, quite possibly. ...of which the modern world allows us to capture every last detail. I envy my children the rich-media history they'll have of their lives - no album of blurry, fading Instamatic snaps for them. |
All
March 2020
|