Intention

Today I have done the thing.

I have fulfilled one of my New Year Intentions. I did not really expect that I would ever manage to do it, but it has been the wettest of dreary wet days. I did the things that needed to be done, like the laundry and the dinner, and collecting Mark’s prescription from the chemist. Even after all of that there was still a huge amount of day left at my disposal.

I would have liked very much to retreat to the armchair with a book, but I did not. Instead I resolved that I would do something to make my life a bit better.

I would tidy up the inside of my computer.

It is astonishing how much junk collects on the inside of a computer. I seem to have amassed piles and piles of it.

The worst was the photographs.

When I looked I discovered that I had collected seven thousand photographs, all of which were stacked in virtual teetering piles inside my computer, taking up racks and racks of cyber-shelf space.

As you all know, I take a photograph every day, to add to these pages. Well, obviously I don’t take a photograph every day, because on some days nothing beautiful happens, and on other days I just forget. Nevertheless I try and have a different photograph to illuminate my words, or at least to fill the space and make the page look interesting, with every different entry.

That is three hundred and sixty five photographs every year. I have been writing these diaries for six years now, so that meant at least two thousand photographs.  Also mostly when I take a photograph I do not usually just take one. I take two or three, from slightly different angles, or from slightly closer range, so that for every photograph there are probably two or three that were rejected, plus a few that were out of focus because the stupid dog buzzed off at the wrong moment and turned out to be a ginger blur.

Today I resolved to have a spring-clean.

This is the best sort of spring clean imaginable, because it does not involve trailing up and down the stairs with the hoover, or lugging tearing black plastic bags outside to dump piles of unwanted junk into the dustbin. It does not involve agonising decisions about whether or not I will ever lose enough weight to fit into the expensive dress again, or whether Lucy might like the shoes that have just become too miserably uncomfortable for my expanding bunions. Best of all, I can junk photographs, and my computer kindly saves them for a week or two in case I change my mind, before it finally consigns them to oblivion.

This means that if anything does turn out to be important, I can come back and hunt it out again without having to root through piles of ash and plastic bags and possibly dog poo chucked in by passers-by.

I made a cup of tea and loaded the photographs file on to the computer.

There were so many of them that it took ages to load.

I started in 2011, which was when the computer was born, and worked my way slowly down.

I had not in the least expected that it would be so heart-rending.

The children were so little in 2011. Ritalin Boy was just a baby, and Oliver was tiny, and spindly, and anxious.

The thing that I noticed most was the wonderful predictable rolling of the seasons. Pictures of snowy fells in winter were followed by springtime cherry blossom and daffodils, time and again. The garden bloomed into vivid colours and then faded to sludge browns and weary greens, and then became white, with the children a little taller and a little more confident with every winter.

Their bicycles became a little bigger every time the summer sun beamed on us in Blackpool. Blackpool Tower appeared again and again, imposing against the sky. There were pictures of us all looking down from the top, and one or two unforgettable ones taken from above, as Oliver piloted an aeroplane around its spire for the very first time. The Midland Hotel loomed, beautiful and dignified, with overcoats and Christmas markets and familiar laughing faces. Speech days came and went, and carol concerts in cathedrals and chapels and churches, with grandparents and smiling choirboys and giggling schoolgirls and us, looking smart and polished in hats and ear rings.

There came a winter when the garden was crushed to a filthy dust, out of which rose the new conservatory, which slowly became gold in the sunshine. The camper van crumbled to a heap of rusty despair, and slowly, slowly grew and brightened into vivid new life. It appeared again and again then, in Brighton and Orkney, York and Appleby Fair, and time and again on long deserted roads into the highlands.

The kitchen, at first bright and warm, with trays of home made chocolates and mince pies, chutneys and biscuits, was reduced to rubble, and a new kitchen slowly took shape in the daylight beside the conservatory. Tomatoes grew and flourished, and as the fells darkened into winter, the new living room took shape.

There were dogs and tents, London and Paris, Shapinsay and Surrey, and so many wonderful memories I could have added dozens of them to this diary entry.

I was rubbish at spring cleaning. I deleted everything that was so blurred I couldn’t quite tell what it was, and everything that appeared in a dozen almost-identical shots. When I had finished I still had four and a half thousand photographs left.

I don’t care. I will just have to get some more computer-cupboards.