Happy Anniversary

One of the best things i've read in recent memory is the line...

Showing people photos of your children is simply not asking for their honest opinion.

Pardon my french, but no-one gives a fuck. Not after the very first photo at least, which everyone displays a certain curiosity to see, if only to ascertain if said sprog is normal-looking/doesn't resemble some sort of possessed demon-child/looks vaguely like both parents. The master Louis CK drops this segment saying exactly the same thing better than any person ever has or will in human past present or future.

Hypocritical of me then, to compose a blogpost consisting almost exclusively of photos of an ilk not that far removed from the one so far maligned up until now; photos of my parents on the day of their wedding. Photos that tick the same uninteresting boxes as those of the kids, namely that they're photos of people dearly beloved to you, but unbeknownst to those poor souls whose attention you're so fervently drawing them to. 

But i'll justify the below for a few reasons. To start with, photos of the past are far more interesting than photos of some unformed future. Which is essentially what photos of kids are, representations of some unclear, little-formed, for the moment at least, unpleasantly snot-strewn future. Secondly, if it wasn't for the day represented below, it stands to reason that you wouldn't be wasting the far too few seconds of your precious life reading this right now, as i wouldn't be around to write it. So the below relates to you too. The other reason is that it's topical. My parents got married thirty five years ago yesterday.

35 years on the drizzle getme

Photo album, embossed yo

Mummy rolling deep on that aquiline tip

Argentine couz's rolling deep on that silken gaucho garms tip

My grandfather giving his best not one of you mess with me motherfuckers look

My mother doing her best ghost floating gothic-horror impression

The vicar doing his best character from a Tintin impression

Pops looking a little too pleased he made the papers

My argentine grandparents seamlessly holding down their absolute geedom

Mummy looking on adoringly

Mummy thinking what the hell have i got myself into

Pops not waiting til pudding to get his gurn on

Best Mandem in the place

Holy Trinity

General Famalam tingz

I don't have a clue who that guy in the middle is

Best Mandem lighting shiddup at dinner later

My 7 year old couz's thank you card

*

But asides from the reasons mentioned above, there's one more reason that these photos are interesting to me. And that's because recently i've witnessed more than a few of my friends, contemporaries, people i've grown up with and known for a decade-plus, do exactly the same thing as my parents did that day. Get married. And now more than a few of them are having babies. Which is where the showing people photos of your kids is simply not asking for their honest opinion diatribe came from. 

But the one common denominator in all of this is that not one of them, knows the least about what the flaming hell they're doing. Getting married, getting pregnant, having babies, watching them grow, no-one has the faintest clue about what they're up to. It's the most monumental case of styling shit out i've ever seen. Which is why digging up these old photos of my parents' wedding thirty-five years ago to the day, demanded i reframe my understanding of them. 

Where in years gone by these faded photographs showed me clearly a man and a woman going through the perfectly rehearsed motions of something they were always meant to do, a preamble to the one defining moment of their lives - having me - to which my brother was evidently a practice-run, i now know differently. From seeing my friends fumble and err and cock shit up and style shit out, i realise my parents were equally none the wiser. The photos above are documentation of this. They didn't have a clue. At no point throughout any of the day documented above did they know either what they were up to, or what they were letting themselves in for. No siree. Growing up we think our parents have all the answers. 

They don't. 

And nor will we. 

Shit never makes sense. The idea is we just care less about understanding nothing.

*

n o n e t h e l e s s

In the shallow paddling pool of certainty, one truth lies floating in the corner amongst the autumn leaves. Keep the memories of your kids up-tawp, in your mind's eye, rather than littering your mates' inboxes with them. Your kids don't want their photo taken in the first place, they're trying to tell you something.