Pretty much every year, usually around July 4th, I head with my family back to the home country. As my children grow, each trip gets a little easier, the luggage a little less bulky.
On the first full day in England, my wife set off to visit with a friend in London. Having waved her off on the train, my father and his wife took myself and my kids to Coate water in Swindon. After a game of crazy golf, we set off to walk around the lake. My father recalled that when he was young, you couldn't walk all the way around because it was too marshy.
I didn't remember much at all, except a few frames from 1967 in my mother's slide collection. I mean, I had vague recollections on the place, but mostly dominated by the big diving platform in the lake. I'd always thought my father had dived from the highest deck of the old diving platform, but he dispelled this rumor for me.
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The series of slides in my mothers collection showed my sister, brother and myself (the youngest) in the old paddling pool, chaperoned by my grandparents on my mothers side. I'd long wondered exactly where those pictures had been taken. In the top image, I'm the figure in the white shirt and brown pants, holding a toy boat, in the center of the frame.
As we neared the end of our circumnavigation of the lake, my kids spotted a play area with climbing frames set in sand and rushed off to play. As as I entered through the gate to the play area, I realized that this playground was that old paddling pool! Although the framing isn't exactly the same, you can see the same patterns in the stones in the wall. The benches in the nooks are different, but that handrail on the steps on the right looks similar.
I've no real memory of the day the 1967 images were captured, only a memory formed from seeing the slide. So I have to wonder if these images are unlocking long forgotten memories from back in the day, or just creating new versions of what those memories should have been, new bylines for old images. I'll never know.
Production Data
Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Lens: Canon 24-105mm f/4L IS USM AF Lens
Processing: Lightroom 3
Processing: NIK COLOR EFEX PRO 3
Processing: Nik¤Software Silver Efex Pro 2
