Our Sepia Saturday theme image this week features a 1910 photograph of a wine merchant's shop in France. I have to admit, there was a temptation to follow an alcoholic theme, but this is the morning after the night before at the pub, so I will stay clear of all alcoholic references and go to France instead. Rather than go back 100 years, I am going back just over fifty, to the summer of 1962, and a great family adventure when we headed abroad for the first time for a camping holiday in France.
My main photograph show my parents - Albert and Gladys - trying to cool off in the shade of a palm tree. I still cannot work out why they decided to go to France, it was a most un-Albertish thing to do (my Father would consider a trip to Dewsbury as being akin to a wild adventure). To go to a country where they didn't speak Yorkshire, to eat foreign food, and - worst of all - to drive on the wrong side of the road, was behaviour which was most out of character.
I was about fourteen at the time and I still remember the trip well. When we eventually arrived in the South of France, my poor father ventured out into the sun and finished up with severe sunburn, and he had to spend the rest of the holiday in the shade. My mother was slightly more careful. limiting herself to the occasional paddle in the warm waters of the Mediterranean.
Looking back at these photographs now, and taking into account that fifty years separates the theme image from my photos, and the same period separates my photos from today: what is fascinating is the warping of time. The old French wine merchant's shop seems like history: a different world, long, long ago. My photos from the south of France seem like only yesterday. Is this to do with Einstein's theory of light and time - or is it simply that I am getting old?
To see more posts based on this Sepia Saturday theme image, go to the Sepia Saturday Blog and follow the links
My husband never cared about taking a trip to Europe, but he went anyway FOR ME. Maybe that's why your father went - for love of your mother.
ReplyDeleteI hope your dad had fun despite the sunburn!
ReplyDeleteI have a hard time imagining camping in France? In tents? A trailer? And so far as I'm concerned, the French drive on the correct side of the road! :)
ReplyDeleteIt's an age thing apparently Alan, so my Dad used to say. Also, have you noticed that time gallops along faster, the older you get?
ReplyDeleteThose ripples of light do resemble gravitational waves distorting the fabric of time. Or maybe it's just the wine.
ReplyDeleteAh, the days before sunscreen when overexposure banished one to the shade! Wonderful memories, photos and post -- and love your mother's dress.
ReplyDeleteHow great, to split the years into 50 before and after your photos...and pose such serious questions too! OK, maybe the wine talking. But I was so glad to hear that your parents wearing stripes under the palm weren't incarcerated for anything...that the shadows created the stripes! Whew. And aren't you the one to remember that camping trip in such detail. Tents?
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