The same spot....

I have been very conscious since Christmas Eve, when our neighboring farmhouse, Ardachuple, burnt to the ground, of the fragility of things and particularly photographs and papers. Barbara’s son John managed to recover some photo albums from the least badly damaged part of the house - the conservatory - but almost everything else literally went up in smoke.

So I have spent some of this Christmas and New Year break organizing my cloud and other data storage so that there are copies of important things (to me anyway) that are in different places, some of them off site so to speak.

As a result I have had to work out the best and quickest way to digitize the boxes of old photographs we have , having made a fitful start on that some years ago with my flat bed scanner but not having progressed it very far. There are now various apps for the iPhone which make the task much quicker, whilst preserving and sometimes enhancing quality. I am currently appraising Google’s PhotoScan which seems as good as any.

There is a vast amount still to do and I know I will have no time again soon , but I managed a bit more today and amongst the finds was a pile of pictures of the house here just after we moved in 26 years ago.

This one of my mother (who died in 2001) , Cathleen and Cailean must have been taken in the summer of 1993 I think and I couldn’t resist a comparison with what the exact spot is like today - inside, for a start, and part of the place where we spend much of our time when we have the chance, our own conservatory which was built 12 years ago now.