My mother was an obsessively organised person. Everything had to be neat, tidy, symmetrical, categorised, alphabetised, and colour coded before she could relax. This went for every single thing in our home, books, videos, and especially photographs. In the immaculately dusted and polished antique cabinet in our back room, lay fifty numbered and categorised photo albums. Forty-nine of these I’ve never really looked at. They contain photographs that have little interest to me at the moment. Number fifty however is a different story.

Album number fifty is a scarlet book with gold writing on the cover bearing the title “This is your life so far…” It actually refers to our entire family and last week I felt like looking at it. The first pictures are of my parents before they met, my father in denim jacket and flared with long hair; my mother in tailor made outfits, in fading Victorian-style photographs that my grand-mother favoured. I don’t know much about my parents before I knew them. The topic rarely came up.

The next section are my parents’ wedding photos, these are hilarious. My father with a short beard (this was my mother’s idea; my father didn’t like to wear a beard) a

Some topics in this essay:
Trinity College, Forty-nine I’ve, Liffey Swim, Photo Album, scarlet book, pictures parents,