Friday, April 17, 2020

Lockdown day 27 - A picture's worth a thousand words

Google Photos has its uses, but it has some really annoying features too, doesn't it? I think my biggest gripe is the way it keeps track of everywhere I go, then emails me and asks me to write a review of shops, pubs and so on that I've "visited" - except that, a lot of the time, I haven't. I almost always decline, but I will gladly tell interested parties (and Google frequently tells me how popular my reviews are!) that the Roman remains in St Albans' Verulamium Park are "a lovely little wall, though it's showing its age a bit", or that Beaumont School's playing field is "a very nice playing field. I'm sure it's excellent for playing on." In the first of those cases I had walked past the short section of ancient wall, about a hundred metres away from it; in the second, I had literally driven past the playing field without even noticing it. And my reviews are useful? How, and to whom?

One thing I do like about Google Photos, however, is their frequent and regular emails asking me to Rediscover this day in (year). So today I was offered 17th April 2017. And this is what it showed me,





plus all of the other photos I took that day, reminding me that we were at Foxton Locks on a short excursion.

I've taken nearly 26,000 photos over the years, and my cameras have been especially busy since we've been on Kantara.


I often spend time looking at them, reviving the memories of places we've been to together. This is all the more true now; now that we're confined to the marina, now that we have no idea when we'll be able to cruise again. I love looking at the pictures, but it's a bittersweet experience.

These are from this day in 2014,





just a few days before we set out south towards Stoke Bruerne, where we picked up our friend Michelle and took her on a week's holiday. It all came back to me.

Oh, the power of the photo; pictures worth thousands of words, eh? What did we do before digital cameras?

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