I wish... I still printed my photos and put them in albums (part 7)

My wish list is long and life is short.

At the beginning of January I discovered thirteen photo memory cards in a box. Inside them were hundreds and hundreds of photos from the last ten years of my life.

Over the past few weeks I have uploaded every photo onto an external hard drive and organised them in folders under year and event.

Just for fun, I shared some of the photos with you. Thank you so much for your lovely comments. I'm glad they made you smile. 

Yesterday I opened an account with Photobox and created a photo book. I still need to add some text, but apart from that it's ready to print.

What do you think? ----> Norway - August 2012

I hope you like it. If you don't, tough! I'm not doing it again; it takes aaaages.

Did you see this message on Photobox?:

Hi there, I've just created this Photo Book with my favourite photos and thought you might want to see it. 

If you like what you see, you can even order a copy of this Photo Book for yourself!

Just click on the link below to get started.

Richard Pettitt 

I didn't write that! So why is my name under it?! Scandalous. Fraudulous. That's not even a word. Anyway, don't buy it. It's going to be a present for my Mum. You can buy her something else.

Some of you have suggested that I continue this month's wish into next month. As touching and tempting as that is, my heart is set on a new wish for February. 

My wish list is long and life is short.

What I will do though is carry on sharing my photos and anecdotes somewhere else. 

I started a Facebook page today called Piccyback (get it?) for that purpose. But I made an error. I selected the 'Album' option when setting it up, thinking of a photographic album, only to discover afterwards that it meant music album. Great - Piccyback the band. Sounds like a tribute act to Nickelback.

So I scrapped that idea. Instead I went to tumblr, renowned for its photo-friendly themes, and started a retro-looking blog called Piccyback: historical photos - hysterical stories.

If you have enjoyed this month's wish, please follow the Piccyback blog or keep an eye out for links in my tweets. I've barely scratched the surface of my back catalogue of greatest photo hits.

Thanks. Join me soon for a new Wish of the month!

Do you have any funny photos and stories from your past that you'd like to share?

I wish... I still printed my photos and put them in albums (part 6)

Done! All thirteen photo memory cards uploaded. Plus three CDs that I didn't realise had photos on. Surprise surprise.

The photos are a bit jumbled up, and I need to check the dates, but at least they're all in one place and I can view them on a big screen.

So without further ado, here are a few snaps I picked out from the final cards (and CDs):

A night out with friends at Roller Disco in Vauxhall, London. 2008. It's quite a small venue, which is probably a good thing, because if I'd built up a head of speed I could have seriously injured someone.

I have no idea who the girl next to me is.

Anti-war rally in London. 2007. I didn't agree with the decision to invade Iraq so I went along to this march. I wasn't sure what to expect, and I knew it wouldn't make much difference to the politicians, but the people in it were very friendly and from all over the UK.

I felt a bit guilty about that actually because the rally was conveniently on my route to a railway station where I needed to catch a train afterwards.

Commuters queuing for the bus in Crouch End. February 2007. I knew transport would be a nightmare that day so I put my hiking boots on, left the house early and walked to work in Holborn. It took me 1 hour and 45 minutes.

It was the first time I had walked all the way into Central London, and it was great. London looked prettier, people were friendlier, and I was able to stop and take photos.

My sister Rachel and brother-in-law Terry with my newborn nephew Toby. December 2006. Toby came out of special care in time for Christmas, and Rachel and Terry finally got some sleep.

I very clearly remember a conversation I had with Terry during my sister's pregnancy:

"Rich," said Terry.

"Yeah?" I replied.

"I fertilised your sister."

My sister Rachel and her friend Michelle at Frickley Hollow festival. Summer 2005. Unfortunately the rain and the mud and the flapping tents became too much for them and they went home. 

But I stayed on my own and had a jolly nice time. :-)

My friend Callum (left) and his mate Simon (right) celebrating an alcohol-related injury. These guys are twice my size (I may be exaggerating) and drink beer at twice the speed that I do (no exaggeration).

During the summer of 2005 I often walked back from the pub with Callum and Simon. They always stopped to buy a Chinese takeaway, walked halfway home, and then rested their meal on a specific wall. Chinese Takeaway Wall is a chest-high wall that separates a back lane from some garages. A classy establishment, I think you'll agree.

White sand, crystal clear water, clear blue skies... Yep, that's north-west Scotland. Summer 2005. The chap in red is my best mate Anthony, the woman behind him is his Mum, and the boat behind her is mine. Not really. Mine is much bigger than that.

After a bacon sarnie breakfast we climbed Ben Nevis. I'm sure the views are amazing on a good day but we couldn't see much from inside a cloud. 


So there we are. We've reached 2005. Ten years ago. It doesn't seem all that long ago when I look at the photos. But then I'm not in most of them. If I were, I'd probably notice how young I look and how much more hair I had and how much of that hair was highlighted.

But that's not the point.

The point is, these photos and these memories are no longer lost and forgotten on a little bit of plastic at the bottom of a carrier bag. Now I can quickly find them and look at them. And what's more, I can easily get them printed.

What were you doing 10 years ago? More importantly, what do you wish you could do today?

I wish... I still printed my photos and put them in albums (part 5)

I have seen TV adverts for companies that print photos in a book format. So I recognised the name Photobox when my friend Rhian sent me a link to her album on their website.

Rhian's photobook is called Costa Rica 2014 and it has one hundred pages of gorgeous colour photographs that capture Rhian's holiday with her husband and two teenage children. It looks stunning on my laptop. The hard copy must look even better. 

"Wait until they do an offer," Rhian advised me.

Really? Wait? Do I have to? Surely their prices aren't that unreasonable.

I looked. 

One hundred and three pounds, twenty five pence! For one book of photographs!

Blow that, I thought. I'll wait.

I went back to my photo memory cards, loaded the next one into my camera, and uploaded the photos onto my laptop. I did it again, and again, and again. I was on a roll. 

It turns out that memory cards have grown in memory size over the years. The further I went back in time, the fewer the number of photos on each card. It wouldn't take me months to upload them after all.

In a matter of hours I'd uploaded six memory cards. Spring 2009 to Autumn 2011.

The Standing Stones of Stenness, and me. During a half term holiday in May 2011 my ex and I travelled to the Scottish Highlands, Orkney Isles and Shetland Isles. I saw incredible historical sights such as this, and awesome wildlife such as puffins and seals.

Even more incredible is that we travelled to Inverness and back by Megabus and were still a couple afterwards.

Venice in February 2010 was beautiful, busy and very, very cold. The festival was in full swing. Costumes everywhere. But on the outer islands it was quiet. This deserted industrial wharf was so different to the picture postcard image of Venice that I had to take a photo of it.

I worked at Ofsted for three years at their Head Office in Holborn. Whatever you might think about the organisation, the people who worked there were lovely (if I do say so myself). 

For a short while there was a Golden Age of Friday nights out. One of them was karaoke. This is Hussein and his best friend AJ giving it the X Factor.

In the summer of 2009 I attended Wolfsonfest. Never heard of it? It's a tiny annual festival held in a different location every year, depending on where the organiser, my friend Alex Wolfson, wants to to take his friends on holiday.

One of the attendees was Kelly, seen playing table football in the photograph. It was at this particular Wolfsonfest that Kelly announced she was going out with AJ (see previous photo). This confused me greatly, because for the past two years I had thought Kelly was a lesbian.

She wasn't. Which amused Kelly greatly.

The Twelve Days of Christmas pub crawl, December 2009. One of the things I enjoyed doing when I lived in London was organising all-day fancy dress pub crawls for me and my friends. This was a familiar sight; the weird and wonderful strolling and chatting leisurely behind me while I did the map reading and general cajoling.

In June 2009 my friends Patrick and Dominika got married in Warsaw and I was fortunate enough to be invited. It was a brilliant wedding, despite the compulsory shots of vodka, and I stayed in the top notch hotel where the wedding reception took place. 

Unfortunately, the unconscious man in this photo did not, and I foolishly offered to escort him back to his hotel so that he didn't die on the mean streets of a foreign city. It was the longest hour and a half of my life. He didn't recognise his own hotel, he'd lost his key and he couldn't remember his room number. He swore at me and everybody else. And he kept falling over.

Never. Again.

For my friend Emma's 30th Birthday in 2009 we dressed up as heroes and villains and went out in Brighton. I went as a banker. This was less than a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the economic sh**storm that followed. You can tell I was impressed.

Later that evening I was thrown out of a bar for wearing a hat. By a security man... who was wearing a hat. When I say he threw me, I mean he grabbed me by the scruff of my black trench coat and flung me onto the pavement. Incredible. I hope he did it to real bankers too.

In April 2009 I met up with my friends Ruth and Guy in Bali, Indonesia. They had been travelling around the world for six months. I had been travelling for ten days; a week in Thailand and a long weekend in Singapore.

Every day in Bali I rode pillion on a moped ridden by a topless guy whose back was sunburnt and peeling. Gross. Bali was beautiful though. Walking back from a boat trip I caught sight of dozens of Indonesian fishermen and their boats.

I only have four memory cards left to download. Will I finish uploading the photographs on them and design a photobook for printing by the end of the month?

What do you wish you could finish by the end of January? Could you make the extra effort this week?

I wish... I still printed my photos and put them in albums (part 4)

Onwards I went back in time through photo memory cards 11 and 12. November 2011 to August 2013. Tumultuous times; teacher training and teacher...  teaching. Sort of. It didn't go particularly well.

This was a day when it did go well. That's me teaching English in a special school using an interactive story book and a puppet. I sang too. No, there isn't a video. Shame.

My experience in that school was so positive that even now I work with children and young people with special educational needs. Perhaps it was the biting that won me over, or maybe that flying curry in my face.

This is my Mum. She is very pleased that I agreed to go rafting with her next to a glacier, although I have serious doubts about the protective capability of her helmet. Paddling next to a glacier is like stirring a Mojito with an over-sized straw.

The morning of my best friend's wedding in Thailand, and here he is looking cool and collected, when he probably felt anything but. His daughter had just left the room with his future sister-in-law, and we were left in relative silence to finish getting ready, go over our speeches (I was Best Man), and compose ourselves. I'll never forget it.

A hot day in August at Groombridge Place, Kent with my sister and her two children. This is my niece Phoebe waiting to be trapped inside a plastic ball and pushed into a large paddling pool so she can scramble like a hamster in a wheel and we can all laugh at her. Win win!

And this is a photo of my ex at her happiest. We were walking on the outskirts of London on a blisteringly hot day when we stumbled across this hollow tree. This period of time is peppered with photos of her. And that's OK. They remind me only of happy times now, for which I'm grateful.

It's been fun uploading photos so far, but I'm aware that this month is into its final third. So it's time to choose a selection of photos and get them printed. 

Do you wish you did more with your photos? Join me and get some printed or framed this week.

I wish... I still printed my photos and put them in albums (part 3)

I picked up the first memory card. I would start with the oldest photos and work my way forwards in time to the newest photos. That would make sense.

I put the memory card back down. I'm not a big fan of sense. Where's the fun in that?

So I picked up the last memory card, number 13, loaded it into my Samsung ES75 camera, connected it to my laptop with a USB cable, fired up the flux capacitor, and accelerated to 88 miles per hour.

My nephew Toby, ladies and gentleman. In case you're worried about saying something un-PC, Toby is healthy in every way, including his eyes. Cheeky monkey.

This was taken on a short cruise to Bruges in May 2014 for my Dad's 60th Birthday. Unfortunately the sea was so rough that we couldn't dock in Belgium so instead we bobbed around in the channel for two days.

My favourite photo from one of seven weddings I went to last year. The bride's name was Holly and the groom's name was... Darren? I think? I can't remember. They are friends of my friend Steven.

Steven asked me to be his plus-one at the last minute. Everyone assumed that I was his gay lover.

Which I'm not. Just to clarify.

Firle Beacon in August. Immense. The people in the photo are my friends Rupert & Nicky and Nick & Anna. I went for a walk and took some photos because five's a crowd, right?

Nicky & Rupert organised a weekend of camping because it was their last chance before they have a baby. It was very sweet of them to invite me and I absolutely loved drinking and chatting with them around a camp fire and then walking onto the South Downs the next day.

A summer sunset in Buxted Park. I adore this place and walk there regularly all year round. The way the sun illuminates the long grass like this and a breeze ripples through it in waves is an awesome performance that I just have to stop and watch.

I have seen so many photos that make me smile on just 1 memory card. What will I find on the other 12? 

What do you wish you could do that would put a smile on your face?

I wish… I still printed my photos and put them in albums (part 2).

What good is a memory card if you can't remember what's on it?

About this time last year I was moving boxes, stacking boxes and unpacking boxes. Fortunately I wasn't living in one. I had moved back to my hometown and was squeezing years and years worth of accumulated belongings into a small bedroom and a cluttered garage. Needs must.

Whilst unpacking, I came across several cameras and camera cases and boxes of camera-related wires and discs. I put them all in a plastic storage box under my desk because I wanted to keep them safe and I wanted to know where they were. I'd sort them out later.

On Friday I finally pulled that box out from under my desk, opened it, and began searching for digital memory cards. I thought maybe I'd find half a dozen. Perhaps a couple more.

I found 13 memory cards!

I couldn't believe how many there were. Had I bought that many? Did they still work? What on earth was on them? 

I felt a curious flutter of excitement. The sort of anticipation I used to feel when picking up photos from the developers.

One at a time I inserted the memory cards into whichever camera accepted them and then looked at the first and last few photos on each card. Some photos were tagged with a date, some weren't. For those that weren't, I estimated a date based on the events recorded in the photos. 

I caught glimpses of a road trip to Edinburgh (I nearly moved there), a Caribbean holiday (bliss), a fancy dress pub crawl in Brighton (I got thrown out of a bar - long story), day trips with my ex-girlfriend, teacher training in London (I was a 'mature' student - yeah right!), a holiday in Norway, a stag do in Belgium (cold, so cold), and my first craft fair.

In this way I was able to put the cards in chronological order.

2005 to 2014. Ten years! A decade of my life recorded on 13 little rectangles made of metal and plastic.

My next step is to download the photos (Is it downloading or uploading? Do I care?) onto my external hard drive and then file them in folders by date and event.

That sounds suspiciously like hard work.

Do you wish you did more with your photos? Why not dig out a favourite snap from your past and share it with me.

I wish… I still printed my photos and put them in albums.

Once upon a time, before there were slim digital cameras and smartphones with screens to playback your selfies, there were big bulky plastic cameras into which you loaded a roll of light-sensitive photographic film. 

You squinted through a small viewfinder, took a photo, wound on the film using a small crank, and then took another photo. 

But not just any photo. Oh no. You would choose your subject carefully and frame it just so, because you would only get 24 or 36 photos on each roll.

Am I sounding old and nostalgic? Excellent, I'll continue...

When you got back from your trip, you would take your rolls of film to a photo-developing shop where the staff would develop the negatives and print your photos onto paper (usually glossy) over 24 hours whilst having a good chuckle at your rubbish photography skills and a good perv at your beach snaps.

The wait to collect your photos was excruciating and delicious. Would they be as amazing as you expected them to be? Or would they be a murky mess because somebody opened the back of the camera too soon? Or the flash didn't go off? Or you were standing at the far side of a rock concert and the only thing you illuminated was the left ear of the tall git in front of you.

Whatever the result, it would be a surprise. It was exciting.

The next delight was choosing which photos to put in a photo album. And in which order. A few hours later your photos would be lovingly sealed beneath a clingy film or carefully wedged into slits inside a large hardback album.

Et voila! A book of happy memories.

Fast forward to today and my photos, which number in their thousands without the limitations of film, are mere digital files scattered across SD memory cards, my laptop, an external hard drive, my mobile phone and numerous social media websites.

Frankly, it's a mess.

I can never recapture the suspense of waiting for my photos to be developed; I have seen all of my digital photos a mere moment after taking them.

But I can still experience the pleasure of choosing which photos to put in an album, and in which order.

I know that many people these days upload their digital photos onto websites that print them directly into books. 

I haven't done that. Not yet.

So this month I will organise my digital photos, print some, and put them in an album. Whatever format that may be.

What is your wish of the month? What do you wish you could do by the end of January?

I wish... I supported local independent shops (part 4)

Shopping in local independent shops does good and feels good. What's not to like?

Mid-afternoon on 17th December I began walking home in a hurry. I needed to shower, change and drive to my work Christmas party. I also needed to buy wine and chocolates for a colleague whose house I would be staying at afterwards. To say thank you for putting me up. To say thank you for putting up with me!

I crossed the road towards Tesco and then remembered my wish of the month: Support local independent shops.

I paused. I didn't have time for this; I was in a rush! I could buy a bottle of wine and a box of chocolates in Tesco and be done with it. But I'd have to visit two shops on the High Street where the prices would probably be higher and the choices fewer.

Bah! Humbug! What a Scrooge!

I walked to the High Street and into Noble Wines, a small off-licence, where I bought a decent bottle of wine at a similar price to what I would have paid in a supermarket. Then, a little further up the High Street, I bought a box of chocolates from Uckfield Candy Store and More. 

Since both shops were on my walk home and there were no queues to speak of, I was home quicker than if I'd hiked around Tesco, chosen from their vast selection of products, and queued to pay.

A few days later I returned to the High Street to finish my Christmas shopping. It was an operation of military precision. Armed with an empty rucksack, a list of presents to buy, and a working ballpoint pen (rarer than it sounds), I stormed the little shops. 

I bought a present for my brother-in-law in Propel Bikes, an independent cycle shop owned by the very helpful Rob. I picked up gifts for my nephew and niece in Kids Stuff, a local family-run toy store with an impressive selection and, admittedly, another 6 shops in Kent and Sussex towns. And I found a little something for my Nana in Kamsons Pharmacy, which again has stores elsewhere but its Uckfield branch was its first. 

I also visited two fab independent shops seemingly run by couples: Pipe Dreams (Snow-Surf-Skate) owned by David and Julie; and TN22 Sussex (Lifestyle, Vintage & Re-Worked Furniture) run by Steve and Janie. I didn't buy on this occasion, but I'll be back!

I wondered whether my locally purchased gifts this Christmas would be as happily received as presents I'd bought from chain shops in previous years. From what I witnessed (and assuming my family are not talented actors), they were.

I'm not suggesting for one minute that you or I stop shopping in supermarkets and department stores and household name shops altogether. They have their benefits. But...

The next time you need to buy something, ask yourself if it's possible to buy that thing in a local independent shop.

If you're not sure, go and have a look. You might be pleasantly surprised. Surprised by the selection, the price, the customer service, and probably by a warm fuzzy feeling inside for having supported a local business and the local people behind it.

Shopping in local independent shops does good and feels good. What's not to like?

I wish you a very happy New Year! Join me soon for a new Wish of the month, and tell me what you wish you could do in 2015.