After what seems like a long break Tara’s weekly Gallery is back and the theme is Family.

Hmm, this is quite difficult for me. I’d don’t have a lot of very close family and while my parents and I have always taken photographs we aren’t much ones of taking snaps of each other. Indeed my father hated being photographed so I have only one or two photos of him in his last 20 years! My mother isn’t much better.

But anyway here are some photos of my mother.

I don’t know who took this first shot (probably my father), but I would guess it must date from the late-40s (before I was born) or maybe as late as the late-50s; my mother can’t remember either. It could be any bit of English seaside but is likely to be the Kent or Sussex coast, possibly Rye or the Whitstable/Herne Bay area.

The second shot would have been taken (again by my father) around 1960-61 when I would have been 9 or 10. Yes this shot really is over 50 years old! We were on a having a camping holiday at a nudist club — see I keep telling you I had a Bohemian upbringing! I recall it as a furiously hot fortnight, so my mother is watering me in an attempt to keep cool!

[And before anyone thinks to complain, there’s nothing here you wouldn’t see on the beach these days, or in the gym changing room! Or as Noreen’s godfather would have said “If you seen anything God didn’t make, heave a brick at it”.]

Oh for such carefree childhood days again!

The final; shot is one I took of my mother last summer, as she approached her 96th birthday!

We were sitting in the gardens of her care home, enjoying some rare English summer sunshine. Noreen is in the background.