Silver lining?

Every cloud has one we are told. Well, I don’t believe that. But I do believe that it's true of some clouds, as I've just experienced a rather lovely and surprising silver lining. Before I tell you about it I must first describe the cloud.

Recently we’ve had troubles with our email delivery system. It’s too tedious to go into detail but it necessitated getting our ‘computer doctor’ in and he seemed to have resolved the problem. Then he asked, ‘anything else I can help you with?’

Here I have to backtrack a bit. My dad fancied himself as a photographer. And being serious about it he took transparencies. After his death, in 2009, we found hundreds and hundreds of photographs, large boxes of them, which he’d laboriously made up into slides, with glass and tape.

Not wanting to throw them away, and anyway wanting to see and keep the images of my growing-up through the many family holidays immortalised there, I bought a gizmo that is supposed to convert photographic transparencies into images that can be stored on the computer. I’d bought it online and hadn’t done sufficient investigation. When it arrived I realised it wouldn’t take my dad’s jumbo-sized slides.

Don’t despair, I thought, I’ve my own pictures I can copy. With my first 35mm SLR camera, I’d gone the same route as my dad, and had taken only transparencies for a period of about 5 years.  But, though my pics fitted my gizmo, I still couldn’t make it work. I spent a whole day puzzling over the instruction book and experimenting. I could capture the pictures but I couldn’t transfer them to the computer. 

So .......when our computer doc asked if there were any other computer related problems he could help with I immediately thought of the gizmo that’s been sitting unused on my desk for 18 months. He agreed the instructions were badly explained, but within moments had worked out how to use it. Hurrah!

I am now able to post pictures that even I haven’t looked at for over thirty years. Featured are my boyfriend of the time, Geoffrey - later to become my husband - and me, on our first holiday together in Minorca. My very own and very personal silver lining.