"I have found a photograph

of E... and I wondered if you would like it?" came the text message. It was one of those messages that are unexpected. It was not simply the information in it but the contact from the person sending it. P... is in her nineties and I would not have been sure she would know how to send a text message of that length. I think she is rather better at it than I am.

I called her back, had a short chat and agreed it would be good to have the photograph. It was always E... behind the camera and I have never had one of her. 

Perhaps it was just one of those weeks where that sort of thing happens. Two days later I saw someone who had been to school with E...  O... was a "junior" when E... was a "senior" but they had known one another. They sang together in the choir.

O...still sings in choirs. We have known one another since Guide camp days. I went to the university choral society with her. I cannot sing but their director had other uses for me.  E... was a member of that in her university days too. 

O... and I reminisced about that. When I left her to go on her way in the supermarket I thought about connections, connections with the past. There are not a lot of those connections in my life. I moved around too often. I have no connections with my school days. I was much the youngest in my first year at university and that was on the other side of the world. It does not make for the sort of long-term relationships which can arise from spending your childhood and adolescence in one place.

And it made me think of the woman who has just lost her appeal against her conviction for the murder of three people and the attempted murder of a fourth. She still denies any wrong doing. She will almost certainly go on doing that. She will almost certainly die in prison. She will have no long term connections with anyone. Her fellow inmates will come and go. The guards will come and go. Her children, if they visit, will come less often as the years go by. It just seems such an immense waste of a life. 

Perhaps that too is why photographs are so important. They are a reminder of and a connection with the past.