My life in pictures

This morning's news starts to set in after sleep has healed my heart and mind. Through pneumatic drilling, Callum fell into the deepest afternoon slumber, that which he has been in for the last 5 hours. I will wake him up soon and we shall have a warm rosemary and lavender Bert's Bees bath together, the one I've been waiting for to savour with him, to wash away the hospital, for when he's awake.

"As I pull the trach out, Reuben signs "Thank you" to me but is crying a little. Perhaps in relief, feeling all the rollercoaster of emotions I've been burdened by. When he's sad, I'm depressed, when happy, I'm ecstatic." My backblipped words dance around in my head now.

Reuben's trach is out, that most magical news I can now digest.

Home is peppered with out of place things from the garage and what was Reuben's bedroom. My life's photo collection, with it the aroma of a dusty library, in what must be close to 100 albums now sitting in and overflowing from the Radio Flyer Wagon til it finds a newer home in my home. It speaks of the pre-digital age and my huge collection of film SLRs, each with bits and pieces missing or broken. I opened one such album quite randomly and the flood of memories of my sister Anne-Marie and I sitting in the garden of our family home outside London spilled out. Beside us in the album, Mum in another photo was reading the newspaper cover to cover, as she's done every day since. We are donned in bikinis, early 20s skinny in the late 80s and I have no doubt the TV was out in the garden too were it to be Wimbledon tennis fortnight. That was a ritual tradition: trying to find some shade in the garden whilst Dad wheeled out the TV for us to watch the finals, Borg, McEnroe, Novotna. Then university at the dawn of the 90s in London, 80s hairdos giving way to something a little more modern.

And inches away within the wagon sat such different life experiences: my travels to India, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tanzania, Kenya, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Japan, the USA, Russia, so many European countries, countless places I can now barely recall, all recorded in pictures, shooting a roll a day and returning from a holiday with 30 rolls of expensive processing to undertake. I may have annoyed too many friends to mention along the way in taking them, but for these moments of nostalgia, for history alone, this is why I will always take photographs.

I stopped making traditional albums about 8 years ago when I experimented with point and shoots in favour of my SLRs, lost to cyberspace forever 1000s of photos which had not been backed up and sadly gave up, like the art of letter writing before it, the art of making albums. I make hard backed coffee books of photos now but am years behind.

This is my life in pictures. My life's work.

I have peace in my heart tonight. It's a rare feeling of late. I cannot wait to see my wise, sweet boy tomorrow, please God with just a little bandaid covering what was once the gateway to his breathe of life.