When we lived in the UK we were not really happy. I mean, there are a lot of things there which were great and which we enjoyed, but daily life ground us down. The weather and the traffic mostly. We spent most of our years there trying to figure out how to get out with dignity, and that probably led to us being down on some aspects of British life when we didn’t need to be. I’ll tell you, there are things I pine for now. Sorry, Britain.

We lived in an outlying suburb of London. We started off there because The Daddy was working in central London and I was working … not actually in London at all, in fact quite close to Oxford. So we had to find something in the middle. Then I had the T-Bot and stopped working and we could have moved, but by that time we had neglected to buy in our favorite area (obviously the ONLY POSSIBLE area) and house prices (and rents) had doubled.  So we stayed. Oh, and how we grumbled.

The whole point of this post really is that sweet Andrea of Sweet Life tagged me for a meme. It’s the sixth photo in your sixth folder one which I have already done but joy! The Daddy messed up my photos and now the sixth of the sixth is a different one! So here it is, the view from the roof of our apartment building:

Recently I revisited this High Street (FYI the British words for Main Street) courtesy of Google Maps, and after four years away I was still infinitely familiar with every store, every storefront for the whole length of it. Not much has changed there. I used to walk this route twice a day pushing my stroller, sometimes with the T-Bot on my back, all the way up to the library and back. We would stop in at stores we didn’t need to stop at, visit the playground, sometimes sit in the library for a while. The supermarket was across the road and we would go there most days. It was a regular, mind-numbing routine. But it passed the time and it kept the T-Bot occupied and sometimes would even tire him out enough so that he would sleep.

When we were there tourists used to tell us how pretty it all was and how quaint and we used to ask ourselves How? Why? All we could think about was the traffic, the drawn faces, the buildings blackened by pollution. The arctic winds whipping down the high street numbing fingers and noses. The crime. The line for the slide at the playground (What? The line for the slide at at the playground can be a major deal. Especially if it is a line 20 children long).

But the fact is, with distance anything can look quaint. And we surprised ourselves when we looked back at this set of pictures, because suddenly it didn’t look so bad after all. Now that time has passed and we no longer have to be there, we can look at this photo and think: “Awwww. Quaint!”.

I am not going to tag anyone for this meme, but if you want to do it, just throw the link in below!

There is so much I could be blogging about, you know, IRL stuff, but then I end up writing something like this:

I am now officially an old old woman.

The Daddy downloaded Purple Rain and we have been watching it in installments and do you know what? I have been feeling a little nostalgic for simpler times. Don’t worry, I am not going to say simpler, more innocent times.

It was actually the first time I have watched Purple Rain and it is all a bit sad and pathetic isn’t it? At least with hindsight. All that C-grade “acting” and flouncing around and Prince doing his Bollywood starlet impersonations with big mascara’d doe eyes. I know we all thought it was cool at the time.

(Cough, except for me because I was 12 and wouldn’t have been allowed to see it anyway. I did secretly want to be Madonna, though. Which was a totally healthy reaction for any teenage girl back then).

There is no getting past one thing though. Whether or not through an accident of sloppy directing, it does do a good job of depicting the drama and pathos that is teenage courting. Ha! I used “courting” on purpose. Because I am old. Also I used “teenage” even though anyone at 19 should rightfully be considered an adult. That’s a sign of age, too.

What I mean is, Purple Rain is just one long music video with quick cuts to posy teenage angst and long silences and issues which never get resolved. It’s all very confusing, just like being young is very confusing. It’s like one long alcoholic haze. Things happen for seemingly no reason. You know, he takes her on the back of his bike to the middle of nowhere, she gets down under a bridge by a train track (why? why?), they fight and she runs away. Then he gets back on his bike and rides home and apparently doesn’t see her for a day or so.

Wait. Pause. Rewind (which you do by noisily pressing down that big mechanical button. And it doesn’t quite click in, so you hit it again, this time with more force. Some of the young’uns will have no idea what this old lady is going on about).

Let’s go over that again. Never mind that he just left her there. This is Prince, after all.

This is what gives me pause: he didn’t reach for his cellphone to order her back (does anybody else remember that awful feeling of dread when you would fight with someone in a public place and they would flounce off, leaving you to calm down but with absolutely no way of contacting them to find out where they were?). And where are her frantic texts, telling him what he can do with his damn hoop earring which was probably only gold plate anyway and she knows because she saw one on Ebay for $2.99? (U R NUTHIN 2 ME is about the best I can do, given that I came of age pre the emergence of rampant text msging). There are no scenes of her updating her profiles on Facebook and MySpace to “single” and then writing a host of status updates trashing him. No shots of her returning to her hotel room to cry over You Tube videos of his performances on a loop. She also isn’t DM’ing her BFF back in Norleans to ask her what she should do now. Actually,  and we know this because she says so in the film, Appollonia doesn’t even have a phone. So I’m guessing she couldn’t update her blog either.

And where is the scene where he finds her website (complete of course with poses in lingerie) and then googles her and finds the nekkid photos and throws the laptop against the wall?

You know, that is how I would have written the movie.

Except it was 1984 and I didn’t have a crystal ball. And maybe, just maybe, those times weren’t so simple after all.

Wow, it’s been a long time.

So long that I had to read back in time to find out exactly which photos I had promised you. There has been a lot going on here, which I will be sure to blog about later. I know, always later…

In the meantime, I did promise you my 80’s hair. And I always keep my promises, although in this case I really really don’t want to. Had I partaken of the silly juice when I wrote that post? OK. Deep breath. Here goes:

Oops. Looks like my hair got a little flat on top. Maybe I forgot to backcomb it that morning.

The scanner cable hasn’t turned up yet but that’s probably because I haven’t had time to sort through the boxes and boxes of cables and find it. Luckily (why didn’t I think of this before?) I haven’t managed to lose my camera yet. And I see that I also promised pictures of us. At different times. Together. Well, won’t this be a trip down memory lane? And an interesting exercise for my last remaining non-family reader!

Hmm. My parents sent me a bunch of early scanned photos from their archives and dared me to put them online. This, believe it or not, is the best one they could dredge up. The others are CENSORED. This one really should be too. But, you know, they dared me.

And now, what about a wedding photo?

Those caterpillars crawling down the side of his face were all the rage in our circles at the time, for those not willing to go for the full-on goatee look. The Daddy did grow a goatee once but it scared me and I made him shave it off.

And those children? All grown up now.

Yes, it was a lo-o-o-o-ong time ago.

Many many years passed. Eight to be exact. And then we had a baby and traveled halfway around the world with him and here we are snapped pretending to be full of beans and not at all wishing we could just give the baby away to a random stranger and sleep for a thousand years.

Then the baby grew up a little. Here he is at 18 months. Oh, and us in the background, looking, again, faintly manic:

And now, three days before we set off on our great adventure. April 2005. Not sure what was wrong with the T-Bot.

And that, unbelievably, is where our photo story ends.

Want cute photos of my kids? Can oblige, 1000 times over.

Want photos of us together? Come visit! Take one!

I dare you.

Mama Ginger Tree tagged me for a meme, and although I am not always a great fan of memes, this is a really nice one. You are to choose the sixth photo from your sixth album and post it along with a description or the story behind it. I was not the only one a little puzzled by this, but then Mama Ginger Tree (being a very intelligent being) explained that you could use virtual photo albums from your computer.   Ahhh!! I get it now. Thank you Mama Ginger Tree.

(See how I managed to get three links to her blog into that paragraph? That’s because I like her).

I decided to use the kind of arbitrary “events” that iPhoto sorts photos into, apparently by date and/or some kind of smart photo analysis, who knows.

Problem is, The Daddy has imported a lot of our older digital photos into iPhoto, so that the sixth photo of our sixth album turned out to be this:

A shot no doubt taken for posterity in the days when we people working on sorting out the Year 2000 issue thought we were pretty cool and saviors of the earth. Or something. That is the sign on screen for one of our Y2K test databases. It was called Y2KITE, but we never called it that, preferring to replace the K with a SH. It is displayed on my after hours support laptop, meaning the photo was probably taken at 2 or 4am, or some other ungodly hour of the morning when a job would typically choose to fall over.

Anyhooo, no one in their right mind would be interested in that, so I decided to cheat and begin with the moment I started having children. This is, after all, strictly and unashamedly a Mommy Blog. Having counted up six albums and to the sixth photo, this is what I came up with:

The T-Bot, aged 3 weeks. He had a bad case of facial eczema not long before this photo was taken and still looked like an extra on Star Trek. But that’s OK. My husband happens to like Star Trek**.

Quite fitting that the sixth photo should land on the T-Bot and not, say, on a shot from the Dover-Calais ferry or our (at the time) new apartment. Since the T-Bot will no doubt be the subject of my next post. Given that I am seeing a lot of him these days.

In the meantime, I am going to tag… oh goodness. As my 2.4 readers know, I have been on blogging semi-hiatus for a while, and that includes reading and commenting on other blogs. Did anybody tag Marinka already? Do you think she would play along, what with her being such a big enormous award-winning blogger and all? I would also like to tag the following people, who will not know me because mostly I am a very rapid lurker:  Parisienne Mais Presque, texasholly, Flotsam. There. That’s 4. Along with the two extras already given by Mama Ginger Tree  that makes 6.

We’ll just say she stole them from me.

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(**He would probably want me to clarify here that he only likes certain Star Trek series like for example not the one with the gloopy music and sentimental story lines, and also not certain other ones. Really! It’s all just a load of people running around with Play Doh on their faces and who can keep track?

Oh, I just realized I might be mixing up Star Trek with Battlestar Galactica which is also on a space ship or vessel or whatever you want to call it. Although I seem to remember there is less Playdoh and more posing and deep significant silences in this one. Please, no hate mail…

Damn, was I actually thinking of Star Wars? I should just shut up now).