Slide night :: travelling in style

I love slide nights. I love the translucency of the colours, the musty smell and the faint heat from the projector, and the little stories that come with each picture. My Dad has thousands of slides, and I love sitting in the dark and staring at the past. We don't as yet have a slide scanner to take those images digital, but Dad does have a scanner and on the last, sad trip to Brisbane I collected up a whole lot of Grammy's photos and put them on a thumb-drive. Mum doesn't know what to do with them - they're another person's memories. But I'm happy just to look and marvel at the difference and the sameness I see between those people and my own life.

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These photos are from a trip my Grammy and Grandad took to Japan with my mother, back in the 1960s, back in a time when people made more of an effort when they travelled. I'm always a little taken aback by the get-ups I see in the airports - I'm not saying people should travel in furs, with their maids carrying the jewels in morocco cases, but surely there's nothing wrong with being turned out - and seen off - in style. I was going to write "My Grammy is the woman in the headband, standing next to the woman in the glasses", but I now see there are many glasses, it was the age of glasses. So I'll keep it at, my Grammy is the woman in the headband, the one with truckloads of style.