Memory

Posted by Glyn Wade

My memory isn’t brilliant….as my wife well knows. I told those in attendance one club night that a return visit to the Acropolis atop Athens was just like it was the first time….because I couldn’t remember having been there before! I went there sometime in the 1990s but absolutely nothing rang any bells. My memory appears to be selective as I can remember silly things like who had a hit with My Sharona and even the odd important thing (like my wedding anniversary fortunately!). But some places I’ve been (and I’ve been to over 30 countries) are not quite so stuck in my mind as others and I often get them mixed up.

I remember having a fantastic holiday in Jordan a few years back with my daughter. It was in 2000…something and I remember it well because my daughter was…erm…about…well let’s just say that she was younger than she is now. I do remember that we didn’t do our usual travelling around holiday.

We stayed in just two hotels on that holiday, with a week spent in each, when our normal figure would be about 8-10 hotels in a fortnight away. The first week was spent in the capital Amman then we headed down for a week in Aqaba. There was some scuba diving down south, I’m pretty sure we went to Madaba, we must have been to Karak, I definitely went for my second dip in the Dead Sea, we certainly ventured out on camels into the Wadi Rum and of course we went to Petra.

Petra of course features in one of the Indiana Jones films….probably the Temple of Doom (although Claire tells me it’s the Last Crusade!) so of course I get to see it every time I watch the film. We also have a picture up in our living room that Claire took when she went there, also before we got together. Somewhere in the house I have a diary I kept while we were there….somewhere….

Now I guess you’re wondering what this all has to do with photography….but you may also be wondering why I don’t just look at the pictures I took while I was there to remind me of my trip. Well, that’s the point. I did take pictures. The camera was nowhere near the standard I have now but I snapped away storing the images on my memory card.

Which broke.

And never worked again.

So I can’t look back at my holiday photographs because they are lost (despite having had an expert trying to recover them) and I’m left with my appalling memory….and other peoples’ pictures from the internet. I suggest you take some sort of moral from this sorry tale and I’d tell you what it is…if I could just put my finger on it….