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?