There’s only one thing to do when it’s raining cats and dogs outside and you’ve finally got the baby down for his long overdue nap and that would be to put your feet up with a steaming mug of chai and a petit four. Oh, and it wouldn’t hurt to keep one hand rocking things on the baby front … just in case.

Seriously, for one of the driest cities in the country, Perth has really turned in the showers this week. It’s times like these that make me truly appreciate tumble driers and the fact that I’m not out there battling the peak hour traffic.

With my usual walks long the foreshore a non event due to the rain and wind, I’ve finally been able to settle down and sort through old family photos my dad has unearthed when he and mum packed up our old house and found themselves sorting not only the furniture but decades of memories my brothers and I left in their care as we left home and moved all over the place.

Thirty something years worth of photographs sat in three modest piles on a desk in my dad’s study. It’s crazy that I probably have the same number of photos stored on my hard drive and phone from the last few weeks alone. Yet, that’s how it was for our family up until the nineties. Photographs were taken on holidays, birthdays, weddings and for school. Selfies and ‘what I ate / wore / found amusing just now’ photos were unheard of and probably not possible with the clunky cameras back in the day before smart phones changed the role photos have in our lives.

Technology seems to have changed the way we live life, allowing every little moment and detail to be immortalised as an image where once a vague memory would have sufficed. And we were all okay with it, weren’t we? That piece of cake still tasted just as delicious. It was fine to moan to your friends about hot cross buns being sold in January the day after you did the grocery shop rather than having to make a public service announcement on Facebook right there in the bakery aisle.

The limited number of photos of our childhood only made each one of them more prized. I have the only copy of a Pixie Photo portrait of my brother and I before our youngest brother was born. It’s creased and yellowed and can’t be made into a screensaver or shared online but I can touch and hold it whenever I want.

www.contactmusic.com

Still on the subject of memories, I’m reading Rod Stewart’s autobiography, ‘Rod’. Published in 2012, it’s well worth a look, even if you’re not a die hard fan. Rod can really write. He’s witty, wry and funny. It’s a given that names will be mentioned in his memoir – his contemporaries include The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and his past marriages were to supermodels but it’s no really name dropping. I’d call it recounting some hilarious stories about the adventures Rod got up to with other people who happen to be very famous.

 

Rod’s start in the music industry was rocky and he’s quite frank about this and other things in his life that didn’t quite go to plan. He keep thing interesting by interspersing little pieces about his hair, train model making and cars between the chapters about his professional career and personal life. So far, his hair’s biography has been my favourite read.

 

Okay, that’s it from me. Back to the Kindle to see if Rod can top the tales about his hair.