My parents weren’t exactly hoarders but they also had a habit of collecting things and keeping them for an unnecessarily long time. I don’t mean particularly special or valuable things but there is an awful lot of paperwork to sort through – they kept every payslip and bank statement they ever received. There are certainly some more interesting things in there; for example, a draft reference for Andrew Wiles as he was leaving The Leys (where he was a pupil) and long before he proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. It is an entertaining thought that Dad may well have taught him maths.
My early life was inevitably influenced by growing up in North A House and The Leys in general. A particular feature of the time was the Saturday Club – an old people’s club which, understandably, happened each Saturday afternoon. Saturday’s always began with cake and sandwich making in the morning and the afternoon involved driving a minibus around the old people’s homes of Cambridge to pick them up and then take them home again at the end of the afternoon. This may seem like something of a rabbit hole but I think it was the Saturday Club that triggered Dad’s interest in slide photography as a slide show was a very common form of Saturday afternoon “entertainment”. Obviously, they loved throwing dinner parties and in the early 70s I also distinctly remember a tradition of subjecting guests to an after-dinner slide show. It should be no surprise, then, that while clearing out the Cottage I first came across one large (and rather dusty) cardboard box filled with boxes of slides. I started working my way through them with a slide scanner and was then slightly horrified to find another large box that was just filled with loose slides. There are several thousand of them and I lack both the patience and the disk space to scan them all. There are countless pictures of castles and chateaux, fields, trees, cows, old buildings, France, churches, paintings and much more besides – many are charming but dull and some look like they may have been taken by me when I was three. However, there are some real gems in there that certainly bring back many memories and the best of these are largely what will be shared here.