I have just spent a couple of hours looking through old photographs that I have stored on the computer and various online photograph sties - flickr and photobox are the two sites that I have uploaded to most often. I think flickr has almost three thousand of my photographs on there. My desktop computer has thousands more photographs on that I have not yet got around to uploading.
Recently someone commented to me that they felt that while digital cameras are a fantastic development and allow everyone to see their photographs instantly, we are missing part of what photography means; printed photographs, held in albums that we can look at, hold and take our time over. As I have flicked my way through hundreds of photographs today I think I have decided that I agree.
The photographs I took when I was a child were on film, I had a limited number of photographs that I could take - mostly because mom and dad were not going to pay for an infinite number of films to be developed. Because of that I took more care to only photograph the things I really wanted to. I am not saying my photographs when I was a child were perfect - in fact, far from it. But I think that maybe now we - or I - take so many photographs we fail to look at them. Maybe photographs that remain entirely digital just do not seem to mean as much as the physical photographs.
I do wish that I had taken more photographs on the farm (Llandre Egremont) when I was little. Up until I was around 12 or so the church, St Michaels, was still standing in the same field as the caravans. The graveyard was fairly intact and safe; several of the stones were raised, horizontal stones covering the grave. I suppose many adults would express horror at the thought of four young children making a tree house in a huge Beech tree on the edge of the graveyard and having mini-picnics sitting on the raised stones. We meant no disrespect, in fact we used to talk to the people in the graveyard in that wonderful, innocent way that we lose as we get older.
I have a photograph somewhere of the remains of the church the year we came back after the winter break and found it and the graveyard vastly reduced in size. I was horrified at the time - and to be honest I still am to a degree. The photograph shows my brother on a rope swing that we had hung from the beech in mid swing, one hand on the rope the other out to the side with a huge grin on his face. The church and graveyard with its newly bare earth sit in the background.
That tree was the centre of so many childhood fantasies and games; we would see how high we could climb up the tree, who would dare to jump from the tree on the rope swing - now that was seriously terrifying - and so on. I remember my brother and younger cousin building another tree house in a tree the other side of the field - I think it's another beech - this time with a huge wooden platform crossing several branches and a rope to help you climb up.
I must admit that my cousins did get up earlier than we did at the farm. While they managed to be up in time to collect the eggs from the chickens every day, my brother and I were absent half the time. I was always up to feed the calves though; there was no way I was missing that! Feeding the calves used to consist of mixing up the milk from a dry powder and popping it into a bucket. Persuading the calves to come to the gate and drink the milk was not always easy. Often you had to call some of them until they came closer, dip your fingers into the milk and into the calves mouth, slowly leading them down to the bucket of milk. The new calves were always so lovely and I am glad we were on a farm where they were looked after well, with plenty of room to move around.
As soon as the calves were old enough they went out into the fields. All the cattle were free-range, living in large fields where they were free to roam around. Now and again we would help the farm bring the cattle down from a particular field to be checked over by the farmer or a vet. Of course, it is a beef farm and they are not there just to look pretty. They do end up going to market and from there to slaughter. We went along to the cattle market a couple of times and I have to say that I enjoyed it. I always fully understood the purpose of it, even when I was little. I think we all did. I saw chickens killed, plucked, gutted and prepared for the oven. I fished in the river with my dad, or my mom, caught fish and saw them either thrown back or killed and prepared for the table.
I loved being on the farm and I wish that I could do now what I did in my childhood.
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