There's an unlabelled wooden box in my Grandfather's slide collection containing 100 (well, 103 if you count the loose ones) slides remounted in glass slide mounts.
This contains all the photographs from a mysterious holiday that appears to have involved visiting various parts of Italy and, on closer examination, appears to have started off in the rather exotic location of Monte Carlo which appears to be a cough and a spit over the border from Nice in the south of France, the airport of which started my scanning journey in my previous blog.
Only MONTE-flippin'-CARLO!!!
Again... I never knew they'd been there.
Now, I'm not going to bore you with one hundred pictures at a time (much, I fear, has already been written upon the topic of enduring other people's holiday photographs), so I thought that I'd split them into more "bite-sized" chunks and let them (more or less) speak for themselves.
The funny thing is, though, is that I get the impression that my Grandfather put these slide-shows together as potential (or - for all I know - actual) "talks" which is why sometimes there are pictures of roadsigns to give a sense of place. I suspect that my sister might have awful memories of Grandad's slide shows on long Sunday afternoons of her youth, but their various travels seem to have completely passed me by.
The other fascinating thing is that, fifty years on, and allowing for the onset of digital photography allowing for a far more vast number of images to be taken, we both are pretty much obsessed with taking photographs of rather similar things, like roadsigns to remind (and illustrate) the names of the places we visit.
And so begins an extraordinary, mysterious, and, I suppose, Kodachrome adventure travelling across what I can only imagine is known as the Italian Riviera. Here, then, are the first twenty (!), of what can only really be described as "someone else's mildly dull" holiday photographs from some point during the 1960s,with notes and thoughts added as and when and if they strike me...
We are introduced to the Mediterranean coastline, presumably with what we would now call either "The View From Our Balcony" or maybe that first exploratory walk you take when you arrive in an unfamiliar place and decide to go out to get your bearings.
Over the course of the weekend, week, fortnight, or whatever, these places will become as familiar to you as your own street at home, but in those few glorious awe and wonder-filled hours after arrival, they are mysterious and unknown and utterly exciting to the weary traveller as they emerge blinking into the bright sunshine and crisp air of your chosen destination.
The photographs then introduce us, at some length (apologies for that) to the activities occurring around the swimming pool at the rather optimistically named "Hotel Monte Carlo" in, it transpires, a place which is most likely to actually be Monte Carlo.
The destination for the rich and famous of the fifties and sixties "jet set" as well as, it now seems rather bizarre to imagine, a retired plumber and his wife from Hyde in Cheshire.
I suppose that's where all the money was in those days...?
Mind you, they're not averse to getting their bodies out and trying to even out their tans, despite suffering from the "French Flag" effect in the early days of their trip.
I also am intrigued by the strange "collapsed look" to the buildings in the background surrounding the pool area, and yet people complain about the coming of what they refer to as "Insane" European "Health and Safety" regulations. This could, I suppose, still be something to do with the war damage done in that part of the world, but it's hard to tell.
It could, after all, just be a very crummy old hotel that sounded far more lavish in the brochure with a name like that...
I do quite like the strange wooden bridge contraption that seems to have been made purely so that people could reach the parts of the pool side still covered in debris.
And yes, that is indeed my Grandfather looking grimly into the lens with his arms folded in that shot.
He's possibly worrying that my Grandmother will drop the camera into the water, or showing irritation at her asking him for the tenth time "What do I do?" as he ponders upon such mysteries as focus and aperture and all of that other stuff that "proper" photographers have to worry about even in this fully-automated, pre-programmable, digital age.
There also appears to be a plaster on the bridge of his nose which tells me of untold tales, but might speak volumes about his mood, the expression on his face, and an impending insurance claim.
It might also explain just why there are so many pictures of that wooden bridge...?
Or it may be nothing of the sort.
That white gap at the top of his nose might just be caused by a sun-shadow from his usually omnipresent spectacles.
I almost certainly will never know.
The rest of this set are in the order they were in the box and alternate between street scenes of Monte Carlo town, including views of "Our Hotel" for the folks back home, and the "Casino Municipale" a building into which, I imagine, someone as careful with his pennies as my Grandfather was, they were unlikely to venture.
As ever, because I'm sure we'll return to this topic, I simply love the old cars that can be seen on the streets, and I maintain my (bound to be oft-repeated) belief that the thing that makes a dull, mundane photograph of a street scene into a fascinating one is simply the passage of time.
Back at the pool, Grandmother is thankfully retaining her modesty with an enormous beachball and, later on, having ventured into the water still wearing her glasses, that bridge as two other swimsuited ladies chatter nearby.
Then we accompany them as they venture onto the beach and we get our first evidence of something else that I never knew about my Grandfather; That he was a smoker.
I suppose it was nothing unusual back in those days, but he'd obviously long given up before I became aware of him as a person.
Unless it was just a "holiday treat" I suppose...
Anyway, the inevitable rowing boats (I suppose the "Pedalo" was possibly still a thing of the future?) appear to be hired so that they could venture out onto the water, and this set concludes with a couple of the almost inevitable "Views of the Harbour" pictures that I still take far too many of myself, and I suspect everyone else does too.
Plus ça change, eh, folks...?
Everybody smoked back then
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