GRANDAD'S SLIDES (UPDATE)

No, I don't know who that woman is holding my mother up...
(but they all seem happy enough in the days before I spoiled everything...)

Well, over the course of the Easter weekend, I finally completed scanning the great big box of slides that had been lurking in my life since my Grandfather died back in November 1980. There are now over two thousand jpegs (which is fewer than I thought, to be fair) just waiting for me to share with the world and resurrect from whatever purgatory unseen images of other people's long-forgotten holidays go when they are unseen.

Strangely, when I reached the end, I did feel a little bit sad to find that there weren't any more to do. I suppose that it's that sense of an ending, or just the odd feeling that for my Grandfather, it is, finally, pretty much all over, apart from a few sets of negatives that remain at the bottom of the box that is.

For me, of course, the scanner will come in useful. There are, after all, all my old negatives from my film camera days to consider, not that hundreds of pictures of young student-y types being students, or building sites, or mud flats (once officially dubbed the dullest roll of film ever shot), will necessarily prove of any interest, and certain corners of my dark and dismal past might perhaps be left unexplored if I want to keep my sanity intact.

Actually, the scanner threw a complete wobbler when I tried to switch it to the negatives setting, so there might be a few issues to sort out there, but, in the meanwhile, as the various blogs about Grandfather's slide collection have barely reached the low hundreds yet, I suspect, if I can be bothered carrying on with this, that it's not necessarily an immediate problem.

That said, I must mention how much I've enjoyed exploring these images. In some ways it's rather helped bring that part of my family back to life a little for me as we were never really all that close, and the part of my life that did overlap with my Grandfather's was not really spent all that much in engaging with him, so that I actually have very few memories of him and struggle to picture him in my mind at all when I try to.

Apart from him sitting at his Hammond Organ, or taking off his glasses to scrutinise something in the paper, he's all but vanished, really, so getting this insight into their lives away from us has been very interesting to me.

That said, it's also been interesting to see my own mother, father, and sister living their lives in the years before I came along and spoiled everything, and certainly seeing both my parents looking so young, and so happy, and so alive over these past few weeks has proved very interesting, despite the fact that I'm not much of a one for exploring "Family History" in that way people seem to do.

I'll grant you that there are hundreds of pictures that are probably not remotely of any interest to anyone, the same old family snapshots that we all have that only mean anything to ourselves really, and the seemingly endless parade of weddings of people I don't know has been bewildering, as you'll see when and if we get to them.

That said, the pictures themselves managed to keep on surprising me, almost to the end. The last batch contained some smashing pictures taken at London Airport, and some rather excellent views of ships as seen from a sailing boat on the water.

Finally, it did seem rather appropriate that the very last slide I scanned was of my Grandfather himself, something which had such a rightness to it, that you'd almost think that he'd planned it like that, no matter how randomly I grabbed the slide boxes from the pile.