Hunt the moment

A different feeling today. The sickness and the cold have been (mostly) banished. It’s back to school, back to the morning school run for one parent – and time for the other to get the house back again.

Except that it’s been rather lovely, the weekend extending by two days. Once the obligatory school phone call has been made (ie why we’re not there), the rest of the day rolls out invitingly, even when your companion is not at their best. It’s the avoidance of the school pick up that really helps…

So, is it easier to find the moment on the days with company, or the days you can be solitary again? Both, I would think. But I probably find it easier on the solitary days.

More space to think, to notice things, without any ‘Guess WHAT?’s, requirements to watch/approve/repeat. So today, I go moment hunting – and somehow, I do not come home with something for the pot.

Part of the issue is that it’s not enough to hunt the moment. It’s also about capturing it. These blogs I am reading, they use words to capture (or I would no doubt be off rather sharpish), but they use photos too. Lots of them.

The main one I am gulping my way through has a weekly photo, on a Friday, as a way to capture a moment. I rather like that – regularity, but not too much required of you.

Can I take pictures too? Yes. I enjoy it, too. We take lots. Various boxes testify to how many I’ve taken over the years, especially as a student, but since then too. But when my first laptop coughed and spluttered, earlier in the year, I lost the access to a laptop you could just slot a memory card into.

I’ve got used to the Mac, and generally like it, but I am still a PC girl in a Mac world, it seems. I lack that ‘just do it!’ aspect that the PC vs Mac ads were about. So, clearly, I haven’t been loading up photos to go with my blog posts.

Dan and I know how we work. I’m the words, he’s the pictures. True, I too can take photos, he too can write (and well), but we have our favourite ways of relating to the world – plus we know which ones we do best.

So, I am working my way round to explaining: what I really wanted to capture today was the afternoon sun. We have had some wonderful pockets of late autumnal sun this year, including today. There it was over the coast; there too, illuminating the rugby pitches we travel past on the bus.

And really, it would have been wisest to capture that sun in a series of photos, as well as words. But I did not. Because part of me still thinks that words are the main deal, always have been, always will be. And I am unsure whether or not to overcome that, whether to do pictures as well as words.

I will leave you to imagine the sun for yourself – perhaps from your own autumnal recollections, if you were able to be out in it today.

I think I will go hunting again tomorrow. But perhaps I will consider extending my apparatus for the future, packing a camera spear as well as a word net.

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