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

I have vague memories of the next section of snapshots, mostly of my first holiday to England and my sister’s Communion. The only thing I remember there is that she spilled tomato sauce all down the front of her dress before she had even visited any relatives. There was a picture in there of my sister and I in a dancing competition; she in her blue dancing dress, I in my green kilt. I think both may be in the attic somewhere.

Some pictures of my parents working on the new house, and travelling to several exotic parts of the world (like Roscommon) featured next. This is another part of their lives I knew little or nothing about. The only pure fact I have is that my father studied at Trinity College, then in computers where he met my mother. After this, I never asked about their lives.

What follows I know more about, the birth of my older sister, a small child who slept constantly, only waking to feed. Indeed this continued for months until my mother became nervous and had to be assured my medical professionals that she was just lucky. Personally, I think she should have kept her mouth shut, what she got next is probably classed as “extreme karma”.

Memorable pictures and newspaper cut outs of my father coming third in the Liffey Swim were given an entire page to themselves. I fl

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