Photo day for G at ‘school’ today.
Thinking about the litter of official pictures of these boys I’m building up, I suddenly found myself thinking about the sibling portraits they took at my first school. (That photographer was probably out of business in a few years. Far too focused on what the customer wanted. They should have been pushing individual packages!).
Thinking about why they don’t do it now and about the logistics of pulling sibs out of their classes to be photographed, and suddenly I ‘saw’ the picture of me and my big brother, me with my pageboy haircut, him sitting behind me, menacingly. I remembered the kind of pommel horse thing we sat on, in front of the backdrop, sideways on to the photographer: turn your heads to me now, smile (not a problem for me, posing for the photographer) with my little peg teeth…and it hit me. I was probably Angus’s age.
I can still feel Brian’s reluctance to sit with me, burning through the back of my pinafore. I mean, honestly, forcing a 10 year old boy to act all chummy with his baby sister, to smile as if he LIKED her, in front of all of his friends?! I can just imagine him pasting on his “I’m enduring this” smile, a prototype of the one he still uses today if you point a camera at him. But at least now he doesn’t have to pretend I’m such a burden these days. We can actually get along in public.
So that’s progress.
I wonder what my five and three year old sons will remember in 30 years.