Envy

It’s funny how a blast from the past can change electronic delight into ashes!

I cannot now remember the exact date that I was finally beguiled by the seemingly reasonable price of a Polaroid camera into parting with hard earned cash for the dubious delight of producing instant photographs of Things That Didn’t Need to be Remembered in Concrete Form.  It was only after you had bought the machine that you realized just how expensive each of those pictures actually was.  And suddenly no occasion seemed sufficiently worthy of immortalization and the camera became an unwanted reminder of how you had been ripped off by efficient marketing!

But, time has come full circle and the buying of a new camera for a birthday has stimulated desire for something which is obviously backward looking, namely one of the new generation of instant cameras.  The marked difference between the old Polaroids and the new Polaroids and their imitators is in the printing technology.  I do not pretend to understand the technicalities of the process, but it certainly seems to less immediately chemical than the old version.

In Toni’s birthday camera (a neat, fairly slim, white number) the photographs are only 2x3 inches, but they emerge from the camera already partly developed and they do not necessitate the frantic waving around that was an essential part of the older versions of instant cameras.  The detail is impressive and in Toni’s camera he has the ability to save photos to the internal memory and edit them before they need to be printed – a step up from the point and shoot and print version that I remember.

Now, I am not without cameras of mine own.  I have a totally embarrassing number of them, and my new phone, a Huawei P20 Pro, has a camera system which has been developed in association with Leica with three (count them!) rear cameras!  I have already taken what I regard as some astonishing photographs.  Not that I have an instinctive sense of photographic style, but rather that the capture of detail and the depth of field is astonishing for a fairly thin mobile phone.  I look forward to exploring its possibilities and have printed out a manual from the internet to try and tease out the details of their working that too often lies hidden from the ordinary user.

Even this prestigious phone is not enough to protect me entirely from resentment at a new piece of technology being flaunted in my ever-so-gadget-sensitive face!  Now, I am not saying that I want one of these cameras myself, but I don’t like being without one – if you see what I mean!

Today’s weather is sullenly awful and takes its place in a series of sullenly awful days.  We are now into May and according to the contract that I have with Catalonia, we should be getting bright, warm, beautiful days.  And we are not.  While not actually raining, there was certainly rain in the wind and that is not something that I want to experience when cycling back from my Spanish lesson.  I consider that, having made the effort to exhaust my remaining brain cells by the different varieties of the Spanish word ‘porque’ in all its accented and unaccented forms, the very least that the weather could do was shine on me.  Is that really asking too much?

Perhaps my mood will change when we go out to lunch, though I doubt it as we will have to spend some time planning yet another of the Family Celebrations that make May one of the most expensive months in the calendar!