My vintage camera is full of memories

but no pictures whatsoever

I have fallen back in love with my Casio Exilm camera, its 20 years old, its smaller than my phone and fits in my pocket. 

20 years ago, 2002, I was 32.  I hadn’t yet met my husband or had my son. I was a too busy single parent rushing everywhere, working a full time job, going to Birkbeck university in the evenings and working in a pub, every other weekend when my daughter was at her Dad’s so I could afford treats for my daughter. I could not have survived back then without very good friends, brilliant extended family and giving up TV. Before signing up for my course I remember looking at everything I had to do, how much time I had and what I spent my time doing. I watched a lot of TV, I loved Eastenders and Hollyoaks and other TV you didn’t have to focus on but I quickly realised if I was going to stay on top of my studies and work, TV would have to go, and it did and I didn’t even miss it.

I don’t remember taking many photos back then and I can’t find any pictures on any old memory sticks with photos on – I’ve a few with short stories, but no photos.

You don’t take lots of photos when you’re distressed do you?  

I do remember I going into a photo printing shop though, the ones where you had to slide the memory card into the massive desktop reader thing and select the pictures you wanted printed out. I was really good at printing out photos and putting them in albums, when I was minded to take photos – but I didn’t have much headspace for anything creative back then. Now I save photos on a giant external drive and don’t print them. I think it’s time to reclaim printing photos and putting them in albums – there isn’t much headspace now but for so many different reasons.

By 2004 my old camera lived in my bedside table and everything in my life had changed.  I had met my husband and my daughters father passed away. We didn’t get along and me and my daughter were living under police protection because he told a police officer he was going to kill me, he had a knife and a rope and one of my old dresses in his bag at the time of his arrest so they took him more seriously than I ever did.  He’d been threatening to kill me for at least 10 years before he died, and he hadn’t. I had reported quite a few incidents before 2004 but the police never took my complaints seriously until that arrest – when he also said he was going to kill the police officer that arrested him.  

I think that threat really got their backs up, I got home from work that day to a letter calling me in for an emergency meeting while he was still in custody. I met a really nice detective who explained, with huge embarrassment, that because I wasn’t a crier and seemed to be calm and competent, and black woman, that the police would not have considered the abuse I’d lived with a serious concern, I just wasn’t “perceived as victim.” He had fractured my skull, kidnapped our daughter – I didn’t keep her passport at home and she was on a red list at all UK exit points to ensure he couldn’t try and leave the country with her.  The security guards at my job had pictures of him so he couldn’t get into or hang around the building, I never met him alone and I never ever opened my front door to him. I suffered a decade of trauma, actual violence and threats of violence which the police only took interest in when he threatened on of their own.

Before he was released on bail, we had be offered a relocation, err no I wasn’t moving I hadn’t done anything wrong. I did agree to having a panic button installed and the police used to drive past a few times a day to make sure nothing unusual was happening and they used to call me every evening to check I hadn’t heard from him. His passing, the day before he was due in court left me with complicated emotions. No, I wasn’t sad the person who had caused me so much pain had been silenced by the universe, I was relieved, freed even, he couldn’t hurt me any more and we were safe. All this clashed with being devastated for my daughter loosing her father at such a young age.

There really weren’t a lot of pictures taken at the time so I am really enjoying playing with my old camera and its 3 x zoom. I haven’t got used to not having the anti shake option yet, I think the detective I met would be disappointed in my lack competence!