A new month, a new start

New beginnings.  At the end of this month I will be 56. What's important about that? Not a lot, except that 8 weeks ago my son was 28, so I'm now twice his age (ish) which is quite scary. Lots of his friends now have children of their own, and this prompted a conversation about photos.

For my 50th Birthday, my family put together a photo album using the iMac. The words tell more of a story than the photos do!

You see, I HATED having my photo taken. Really, really. Now I've heard it said (by some ex friends) that refusing to have your photo taken is just attention seeking. But for me, I don't think it's that. As soon as I see someone with a camera, my first reaction is to get out of the way.

Someone once told me that you just have to learn to stop, smile, pose and move on. But I can't. And then someone asked me a couple of questions...

Why?  What started it?

and crucially

If anything happened to me, would my son have any recent photos? What will I do when he gets married, has children etc. when he graduates, he'll probably want a photo taken with his ever so proud Mum

In answer to the first, I've no idea. I've looked back on photos and you can tell I'm not happy; there's a sort of 'grin and bear it' look on my face.

Grinning and bearing it

As I've got older, I've shied away from the camera even more. Now I know that lots of people do the thing where they're behind the camera, but I'm not that interested in photographs. They're just a record of an event. But I've got worse since digital cameras, and posting photos on Social Media.

Of course, putting on weight hasn't helped, so I'm joining the two issues together. And tackling them together.

I took the plunge this morning, and weighed myself. I knew I'd put weight on, as nothing fits. But the reality is that I weigh the same now as before I started Weightwatchers 4 years ago. I am not sharing that number!

But I'm going to try and be more confident around cameras, and maybe, occasionally allow people to take photos. So to start off, here's a photo I took last week in a hotel, somewhere, and another taken a couple of years ago. The only recent photos in existence!