Good things come ..

A certain lady in my life berates me for not throwing things away and I'll hold my hands up and admit that, as we're now both ploughing through all our belongings to decide what to leave and what to take to France, it makes for a time-consuming job on my part. Personally though, I think it's important that I still have my negatives from PR jobs that I shot in the 80s, and I think it's a cultural keystone that I kept a chocolate wrapper just because it's from a 'Marathon' and not a 'Snickers' bar.  However, even I was surprised when I dug out this little beauty from the loft yesterday .. a 1975 receipt from a camera shop in Eccles ..

At the weekend Lesley and I had a conversation about 'kids today' .. and how spoilt and expectant they generally are. (The fact that Christmas advertising is already beginning to creep in is what brought on that particular conversation. Grrr!) Things weren't like that in our day, we both concurred, and then .. Oohh! .. the appearance of this perfect example of  'the way I were brung up'! Now, if you're a regular reader of my blog you'll know I got into photography as a 13 year old and, back then, there used to be a camera shop in Eccles, where I grew up, whose shop window became the portal to my future. I'd stare through there at all the gorgeous cameras and lenses and drool and dream and fantasize. Then, one day, a beaut of a camera called a Halina Paulette Electric appeared in the 'Second-Hand' section of the window. It was 35mm .. a proper grown up camera and a big step up from the Kodak Instamatic 126 I'd been using but .. Ye Gods .. it was TWELVE bloody quid! Now twelve quid was a lot of money when you were a working class (Cue violins) 14 year old in 1975 but man, that camera was going to be mine, and the receipt tells the story of how I got it. The first thing to note is that the shop wouldn't let me have the camera until I'd actually paid for it, so I part-exchanged the 126 (Two quid) and set about paying off the rest of the tenner. It took me two months! From the 17th of February to the 19th of April - with payments of 50p or as much as two pounds - but I made that baby mine and she's gone down in history as my first ever 'real' camera. What a bloody gorgeous memory ..

I told you I was keen on photography! ..