I won't bore you with descriptions of photographs, it would surely be futile. Instead I just wish to share a thought that occurred to me.
I had trudged around the city for hours with a young Twink from Stone near Stoke-on-Trent, who was wearing a Port Vale shirt, as far as I recall, and as we entered the exhibition I felt tired and decided to perch for a few moments on a nearby chair. (Oddly; an exhibit of the kind of chair you perch on when having your photo taken, but not a chair of actual note).
I was really feeling the ten years I've put on since being a skinny, up-all-night-without-trouble, kind of seventeen year old.
I gazed up and into a photograph of a young woman from the past. I imagine she was of my grandmother's generation.
She looked radiant and alien.
Radiant, as though she had firmly mastered being who she was. Alien, because she was undoubtedly younger in the photograph than I am now. Yet, she was a woman. A real, fully-realised woman. And I am just a boy. A boy with no real idea or intention of ever leading a man's life.
It's not just me though, I'm not sure I know any men or women like the ones in those early portraits, they're all gone. There's good and there's bad to the leisured neo-liberals we have become, politically mostly bad. We're a bunch of big kids who take for granted the weight of the world that was carried on our grandparents' shoulders.
Most of all, at that moment, I was struck by the woman's radiance and how it is a radiance I haven't seen very many people with in my lifetime.
Of course, I expressed this to my peer, to the young Twink, in the terms of; 'I can't imagine ever dating this woman, I'm just not man enough for her.'
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