Unbidden

So, weird experience today. I am a pretty busy guy, whizzing around either working, doing stuff with the kids and squeezing in the odd photo session. I like it that way too. Not much time for reminiscing.

I took my older daughter to her guitar lesson today at a house in the village where I grew up. I had half an hour to kill so took a wander through the old stomping grounds.

Went to the old harbour area and wandered out on the pier. I looked down and saw kid-sized shoe prints shoe prints in the concrete.

Bam! I'm suddenly hauled back through a good 25 years of time and I'm a kid again. Me and a friend were playing on the pier, which was still being constructed. A section of pier had been made that day and the concrete was still wet. My friend wore red welly boots and he walked across the still-wet concrete. I didn't dare, he did and those prints became frozen in time.

The shock of the memory felt a little overwhelming, it came unbidden out of the recesses of my brain, dusted off and remembered with that techno-vision clarity reserved for child hood memories.

Its moments like these that remind why I like to take photographs, each is a dispatch from the past for a future not yet lived.

Take photos, make them of their time and place.