I am a world class procrastinator. If procrastination was an Olympic discipline, I’d be a gold medallist. I will merrily put things off for as long as possible, mainly in the hope said things will disappear of their own accord if left alone long enough.

Because I have decided it was finally time to switch broadband provider, I have had to take the radical steps of starting to tidy an area I’ve been meaning to deal with for, oh I don’t know, ten years? The telephone engineer will need access to the junction box, and that is currently buried beneath many, many layers of cruft and detritus.

The danger with such tidying efforts – and clearing out efforts, which are really hard for a genetically-predisposed hoarder like me – is I tend to get sidetracked. I came across photo albums, for example.

I have been taking photos since my late teens. My first “proper” SLR camera was a Zenit EM with the standard 50mm prime lens. I seem to recall you could buy 35mm colour negative film with process prepaid. You’d send the exposed film off, and get the negs and prints returned, plus a new roll of film. It was fairly inexpensive to do this, and I just took photos of anything and everything!

During the sorting process yesterday, I found a couple of ring-bound photo albums from the early 1980s. The prints have faded badly, even while in the dark, but they record family, friends, workmates, scenery, where I grew up… oh, so much nostalgia. It was like a tidal wave.

One stood out, as it was very pertinent to my recent posts about sound recording. I think it must have been the start of a new roll of film, that bit where you wind the camera on and fire the shutter a couple of times to make sure it’s spooled correctly. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, kids, ask your grandparents.

As badly composed as it is, and apparently using an on-camera flash, it captured my Akai 4000DS II and part of my Sharp hifi system. The print has faded badly, losing almost all the blue. It really wasn’t worth the effort of dragging out the scanner for this one crappy image, so I’ve done a quick iPad snap and cropped and converted it to black and white.

Once I’ve finished tidying up, I may spend some more time going through the albums. There are some images of relatives that I would like to keep. Oh, there’s that nostalgia thing again. It gets worse as you get older.