Image credit: www.annuaire-mairie.fr/photo-argenton-sur-creuse.html
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raditionally, December calls for reflection, does it not? Profound musings on the past year beckon, solemn conclusions wait to be drawn on what it all meant. Care for some of that? No, I thought not. I mean, holy moly, where do you start?
moment so long ago, strolling in front of us. Their evening shadows remain.
Photography exercises a powerful influence on our perception of the past. A personal example: it’s a tale of two snapshots. The first was taken in the last days of a marriage in 1989. It’s a desolate In any event, those of us with birthdays image, I look like my own X-ray. I’m this month are quite familiar with the wearing a Miles Davis T-shirt, although I whooshing by of passing years, thank you. soon abandoned it to a drawer somewhere Without going full Stephen Hawking, how due to its association with that picture. we calibrate time is a conundrum too However, this summer it suddenly abstract for me. Maybe this is why it’s reappeared in a WhatsApp photo from my sometimes simpler to measure it, not in daughter. It’s her own daughter waving seasons or years, but with pictures. Sure, goodnight. And (lump in the throat) the clock and the calendar Sophie is now wearing might tell us where we that same Miles Davis Photography currently sit but it’s images T-shirt as her nightie of the past which tell us the because she feels “closer exercises a powerful route by which we came. to Grandad France”. influence on our Photography is life’s rearDark memories wiped perception of the past view mirror. in an instant - one of my year’s best moments. I recently happened upon some vintage photographs of Argentonsur-Creuse, the pretty market town near our home. In the oldest one, a postcard dated August 1907, the Place de la République throbs with activity. Outside the corner café donkeys haul carts past a stack of barrels while women in long skirts and dapper men in suits chat in the evening sunshine. Everyone wears a hat. Our modern world is adorned with everything technology can offer. But on that summer evening in 1907, so was theirs. They too were the front row to history; the most modern humanity had ever been. There’s a poignancy in these images because we know what lay ahead. Watching them now is fascinating yet hard to bear. Every time Mrs W and I sit outside that same café in that same square, I see those men and women in that
I’ve always been effortlessly ‘hip’, even teetering worryingly once or twice on the edge of ‘groovy’. Nevertheless, time’s winged chariot thrusts maturity at us all and I’ve long since reconciled to the allure of the garden centre. I now realise, though, this was merely the gateway to the hard stuff. For in 2021 (gulp) we began keeping a secret stash of Werther’s Originals in the car. I know. Too old to Rock’n’roll, too young to . . . anyone? Further change came to Chez White this winter: the end of the spine-warping fun of shifting several tonnes of logs into the house in instalments. Our new pellet burner has made redundant my daily macho task, (“Stand aside, dear, this is guy’s work”); instead, I now faff about each morning with a small vacuum cleaner. On the plus side, however, I’ll no
Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars longer greet the spring walking like a gibbon. So, nature’s kaleidoscope clicks round again, the reds and golds of autumn give way to silver mist. In our small woodland shadows float back and forth, wraith-like, across the greying light; garden furniture snoozes under its covers, the tractor mower hibernates in the barn. Napoléon, our mighty banana plant, six metres tall in the summer, is cropped and wrapped, awaiting spring’s call to “Gentlemen, start your engines!” Gardens will slumber on until nature – like my old Tshirt – relaunches with a new and vibrant purpose. Thus, another year cranks round. Fully jabbed against life’s nasties, (three for Covid, one for the ‘flu, plus my annual one for Country & Western music), I’m prepped and ready. Friends will once again huddle in corner cafés which reverberate still to the echoes of a thousand customers past. On and on it goes, although, as William Faulkner wrote so memorably, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” It’s been a privilege to share my random thoughts with you this year. Whatever and wherever your Christmas is, may it be what you choose it to be. I wish everyone a peaceful and enjoyable one.
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