At work we needed an extra pic of Theo Crous, the Springbok Nude Girls guitarist. I spent most of the Nineties going to Nude Girls gigs and taking photos, so I volunteered to dig out one of my classics from my photo drawer.
Cue three hours of sifting…
I did eventually find it. And I could have found it within 25 minutes if I’d been able to just flick through the 1 000-odd prints in my box. But that’s impossible.
Could you take a trip through the sprawling boulevards of your life thus far without stopping to smell the roses?
Okay, maybe you could, but then you’re probably seventeen.
I so couldn’t. I got stuck on the shot from the 1993 Great Train Race, of me, Cliff, Jorgie and a girl named Jean on the back of a truck. The year we came second last, I think it was.
Then I got to the ones of me with long hair. The ones of me overseas: me and Gudrun, me and Neda, me and Alexandra. I cannot lie. I’ve known many women in my time.
By this stage, I’m sitting in bed with this drawer in my lap, going though pictures of myself with various beautiful women of international renown.
Next to me, my lovely wife harrumpfs and turns her back with a dramatic flourish.
“Baby,” I protest, “I just looking for Nude Girls pictures,” just as I get to the ones of me with my ex-girlfriends.
It’s not the best thing I could have said.
I’m about to consider guilt-tripping, when I get to the one of Elani in the fetish gear at the one Einsteins fashion show, and the one of me with Miss Phalaborwa!
I track down the offending Nude Girls pic towards the end of my photo collection.
It seems my hoarding of pictures ended somewhere around the advent of the digital camera in 2004/5.
I know I’ve got a whole lot more digital pics , but they’re all lying abandoned and forgotten in folders on my laptop. Folders with names like “Snapz” or “Party pics”, or “All Images”.
I could get in there and double-click on them, and set up a slide show with them and organize them into sub-folders by date, category and, name.
I could start some more photo albums on Facebook. But I dunno. Are these pics really for general consumption? Am I trying to solicit comments from my friends telling me “Lookin’ hot, babe?”
Would that allow me to lovingly caress the image and stare mistily into the middle distance, musing on the exploits of my single days?
No, I know what I should do. Get them all printed out on photographic paper at the photo store. That way I can put them all in a drawer, so every year or two I can open it up and sift through my piccies. A little record of my salad days.
Everybody needs that. Just a little drawer somewhere.
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