Welcome to my blog, where I take pleasure in words and pictures, be they my own or those of others. I'm a creative individual, and the crafty side I explore on my 'other blog', Picking Up The Threads, which I hope you'll visit too. I'm sure you understand that I have sole copyright of my original work and any of my contributions, so please ask if you want to use them. A polite request is rarely refused. So, as they used to say on the BBC's 'Listen With Mother' radio programme, many years ago: "Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin."

Friday 8 July 2016

The Walk of Life

This week’s Sepia Saturday co-incides with what would have been my fathers’s 95th birthday. Dad died three years ago, not long after he and Mum celebrated seventy years of marriage. He was more than a walker; he was a wonderful dancer, and I’m told he had pretty nifty footwork on the football field as well.* However, our prompt picture, is a street walking picture, beloved of seaside photographers, so I’m limiting my post this week to similar pictures, and those which feature my Dad. The one on the right was taken on a long-awaited holiday in Llandudno in 1946, and Dad is balancing my three-year old brother on his shoulders. It was his birthday too earlier this week, so you can work out for yourself how old he is!

The rest come from a family outing to Skegness, the following year.  My paternal grandmother is walking between Dad and Mum, who is holding my brother’s hand. The photographer seems to have caught them at the beginning of their day; the sun is up and everyone looks happy. Dad’s sister, my aunty Jean, walking between my grandparents, has treated herself to a toffee apple. At eighteen she wasn’t much more than a kid herself, but she had married her first husband at Easter that year.


The last picture seems to have caught the family at the end of their day out. The sun was probably going down, the jackets and coats are on, and my brother is sporting a fetching paper hat. Everyone looks ready to catch the bus home to Nottingham and shake the sand from their shoes.

*"He got the action, he got the motion
  Oh yeah, the boy can play
  Dedication, devotion
  Turning all the night time into the day."

Take a walk over to Sepia Saturday to see what other contributors made of the prompt below, and if you aren’t singing along with, ‘The Walk of Life’ by Dire Straits, for the rest of the day, well then, you don’t know what an earworm is!


13 comments:

  1. Everyone was young and full of life at one time. This stitches those times together.

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  2. Aunty Jean looks quite smart in her slacks and jacket! And I'll bet that toffee apple was yummy, too. :)

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  3. What fun photos, so action-packed. I can almost feel their pace. I wonder what else they did that day between coming and going.

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    1. Jo Featherston9 July 2016 at 06:02
      Those street photos are so natural, it's no wonder they were popular. So many people have them in their family albums, the photographers must have done very well out of them. I assume if you weren't interested, you just didn't bother going back to check the proofs.

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  5. On the go, coming and going...

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  6. What better than candid photographs to assist our memories of the real past.

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  7. Lovely photographic memories. I have very similar pictures of my parents, my brother and I and our aunt on family holidays in the 1950 's holidays at Bournemouth - same style of clothes and same poses, caught as we walked along the prom.

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  8. I don't have any photos of people walking towards a camera...just those of folks posed here or there. These are great!

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  9. Unlike so many street photos where the people look angry or confused, your family looks happy and flattered to being photographed. Fun fun shots.

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  10. The most wonderful theme for this week. Love all the photos, your memories, especially your aunt Jean with the toffee apple, so sweet.

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  11. Lovely post, Nell. What is your dad carrying in his right hand, in the last photo in the sequence?

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    1. A little case of some sort. He liked to draw and paint so it could have had some art materials in it, although I doubt he would get a chance on a family day out. I had a similar one which, I seem to have insisted taking on an outing to the zoo when small, so it could have been my brother’s, with a few toys in. We will never know I’m afraid.

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