Kodak Moment

Family can be very insensitive, especially mine. It was one of my cousin's weddings recently, someone I'm very close to. I've never really been big on taking pictures. Whereas some people will snap away at the opening of an envelope, I find I have very little photographic record of my life at all, and I do regret this sometimes.

As it happens I had been intending to buy a digital camera for a while and I figured what better occasion than this to replace procrastination with proaction. So three days before the wedding I bought myself a Nikon 7.1 megapixel total nutter bastard (...which I later replaced with a Sony but that's another story).

I felt very pleased with myself and clicked away during the two day event to end up with over 200 pictures. Rifling through the photos after the wedding on a lazy Monday morning with my cousin sister (when I should have been working instead of bumming), it wasn't long before my uncle decided to exercise the genetic insensitivity that seems to course through the veins of my mother’s side of the family. It was a simple question, said jokingly and without any intention of malice: "Who are you taking pictures for?" he asked me.

I'm thirty something, single, fairly sure I'm never going to meet anyone I want to settle down with, and even surer that I'm never going to have kids. I have no photos around my flat. I don't hoarde. I have very little in the way of memorabilia and what I do have is from many years ago. I'm not inspired to hang on to anything because I know I have no-one to pass it down to. I know all this. But do I really need my family to goad me about it?