They turned the power off for almost four hours at our place, and most of our street, for maintenance of the electricity distribution system, and it was wonderful to be able to just sit and think (it is also raining at present). Strangely, when everything was quiet (no television, radio or internet), I started thinking about life and how things have changed so dramatically over the last 30 years or so. It was interesting to realise how much you can think while there is no background noise (from the television etc.). For some reason I thought about photographs. Throughout most of my life you took a camera with you to any family events and people tended to gather together, stare at the camera and smile as a couple of group photographs were taken. After the roll of film in the camera had been used, which may have been some weeks later, you rewound the film into the cassette, and took it to a pharmacy. They took your details and stuck the cassette in an envelope to be sent off for the film to be developed and the photographs to be printed. These printed photographs arrived back a week (or thereabouts) later in another envelope which you picked up from the pharmacy, and it was only then that you found out if your photographs were as good as you had hoped. As a consequence of all this to do, the first 20 years or so of my life are only represented by perhaps a hundred or so photographs, many of the earlier ones in black and white, as it was much cheaper to develop and print.
Fast forward to the teenies and twenties and my eldest grandson, who is now 3 and was born into an age of smart phones, has thousands of colour photographs and videos which cover almost every week of his existence. This has been a help in coping with not seeing him and his parents, and all the rest of the tribe, as often as we would like over the pandemic years.