Seeing Through the Past

I was invited to a slide show on Saturday evening. I love slideshows. You can keep your Powerpoint and disappointing laptop screens. Nothing quite beats the magic of the big, white, wobbly screen. The projection gives a real sense of light and depth to the photos, and it's fun to see dust dancing in the beam when you look round. Arranging the chairs to make a mini auditorium, drawing the curtains and turning the lights off adds to the fun. The click click of the magazine whirring through memories and the light blinking as the pictures swap over is very atmospheric. To complete the effect, someone has to wave their hands around to make shadow puppets and you have to be surprised at how messy the hair on top of your head is in silhouette.

I was invited to take a couple of boxes of my slides, and it was completely engrossing digging around in the past trying to choose which would interest my friends and not seem too self indulgent. I have an eclectic selection of slides. These include a set of Escher transparencies, the moon landings, explosions in factories, Arthur Rackham sketches along with some Leonardo da Vinci, and some strange people my sister and I drew as toddlers. I wasn't too disciplined in sorting these into order, so the evening became a bit surreal as we leapt from Neil Armstrong, to the Mona Lisa, to me in a nappy smelling a tulip, to water running the wrong way round a tower, a monochrome fairy and back to some footprints on the moon. It was confusing, but very jolly. There was even one photo of 'mother at the oven' - as I've mentioned before, the oven would seldom be cleaned, but when it was it required a hammer and chisel. My friends gasped in horror as the stark truth of these stories was brought home to them in ghastly, life sized technicolour glory. She was frying something to clog my father's arteries.

Some of the slides brought back sharp memories - father hanging a white double sheet back-drop on the garden fence, arranging us all in a 'loving family' pose and running round the camera before the shutter went. I can remember the unusual glaring whiteness of it all, and the oddity of seeing my father move faster than usual. Even though I could only have been about three, I remember wickedly hoping the shutter would click before he made it into the happy family tableau. I look at the slides now and wonder why my mother didn't iron the sheet before it was immortalised.