I've Changed My Picture

The lovely view of Brookend Locks is from where I used to live, where I've walked with children and families for 25 years.  In my previous life.  In the town where I lived from age two, grew up, had children and lived my chaotic life until I was 46.

Friends, Children and Bella, doin the lock walk

That was then.  This is now.  Now I live 25 miles away and am finding new places to walk with my family and their dogs, and my friends and their dogs, and some of my children.  Now they are older, they can choose whether to scrape their sorry butts out of the door and are sometimes too lazy or computer addicted to come too.  Also, a little aspie thing, they don't know this place and these walks so don't want to do it.  I have to find another good walk for them to become familiar with and until I find it and drag them round it a few times the boys aren't keen.  Not for two of my boys is the exploration of the unknown, they need the familiar.  

Ruby's a good walk tester though.  She has wanderlust, like her dad.  Likes to look round a corner to see what's there.

View across the fields to our house

So what I need is new picture of where we live now.  A sort of this is where I'm at kind of a picture.  No, not a huddled jumper over clothes under dressing gown freezing in the corner of the sofa kind of picture.  No  beauty or inspiration there.  What is needed is a trawl through the computer files.

Jarrod hiding at the top of the sea wall on a day at the beach

The first thing is - gosh it takes so long for a technically inept person like me just to attach and arrange photos just how I want them.  The second is I am not and will never be a talented photographer.  The bit that goes from wow I want to keep that view/sight forever to oh that's a lovely photo just don't match up.  It gets lost in translation.  I'm a happy snapper.  I look at my family and think I ought to snap just to give them a reminder of a day or occasion.  A visual memory jogger.  

For years we didn't have a camera (couldn't afford one and couldn't have afforded development if we had).  The first camera we owned we bought (third hand) when I was pregnant with Kurtis.  It was great, it took two pictures for every one.  You had to send the negatives off to be developed though, which wasn't a problem in that slo mo world but the problem lay in finding a chemist that would do it.  Then when I was pregnant with Ruby the kids dad bought me a camera of my own.  Gosh I was so chuffed.  My sister and I took the kids on holiday to Worcester and I dopped it lens out, face down on a concrete path in a park.  That was the end of that.  Then I had a couple of camera phones.  Then I didn't.  Then last year, in order to start this blog, for my birthday, the kids dad's mum bought me a camera for my birthday.  It is my prized possession.  So prized, I rarely take it out and rarely use it. Duh.

I do have one picture that I took that I like though - this one of Kurtis on the beach at Brightlingsea.

So, at the top is the picture I have chosen.  I didn't take it.  Ruby did.  On her phone.  Doesn't need a posh camera, makes up for it with a good eye.