3 h. ago My favourite family photo: ‘We’re plainly not allergic to our mother here, as her legend always had it’

Our politically engaged mother loved deriding me and my sister for being stroppy and delinquent. This picture tells another story – and is a testament to our sunny dispositionsMy mother, Gwen, liked to describe things in broad brush strokes. Me and my sister’s teenage years, mid-80s to early 90s, she’d cover with: “Zoe was delinquent, couldn’t get a word of sense out of her.” Or: “1986? That was the year Stacey was awful.” Going through photo albums to make a montage for her funeral, all her pictures from that era were testament to our ill-behaviour: me, sniffing a geranium, sarcastically; Stace, outside a cafe in an indeterminable European city where you can almost lip-read her stroppy “piss off” to camera in the still moment.Gwen was politically engaged – you’d come downstairs on a Wednesday morning to find a handwritten letter starting, “Dear Pérez de Cuéllar, I cannot deplore enough your silence on the matter of the Western Sahara” – and heavily involved in progressive politics:...

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20 h. ago My favourite family photo: ‘This is a happy picture – and also saturated in grief’

The snapshot was taken just months after I lost my mum, and not everyone in it is still with us. But it is an image of survival, capturing the aftermath of grief and the beforemath of future lossesI remember the moment this photo was taken: five years ago, on my partner Claire’s birthday, in a National Trust for Scotland garden six miles east of Edinburgh. We were standing on a wooden deck, an ideal spot for pond-dipping with the kids and a lesser-known viewing platform for trainspotters. This is where my autistic son, then six, loved (and still loves) to jump in tandem with the ScotRail trains toggling back and forth in the middle distance. We had just eaten a small, hasty birthday picnic of pastries and Nosecco. We wandered down through the walled garden to the wild meadow encircling a pond. We ended up where we always end up. On our deck.Somehow I knew it was a moment worth freezing in time. I gave our dear friend Dawn – whose husband had recently died and who was slowly, informa...

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51 h. ago My favourite family photo: ‘It’s a snapshot of our goofy bond’

Since my mum died, family photos can be painful to look at. But this one of me and my brother is a reminder we still have each otherMy only sibling is seven years older than me. That means he has forever been seven years ahead of me in life, sitting somewhere between a willing co-conspirator and knowledgable surrogate parent – protective but fun, and always aware of the secrets of existence I am yet to discover. It was his aside that spoiled the secret identity of Santa Claus; he who laughingly revealed the mechanics of sex; he who gave me my first sip of beer. Yet, when he found out I was sneaking cigarettes from my dad’s stale dinner party supply, he chastised me before either of my parents could, and when my mum was diagnosed with cancer and I was just 15, he was already a 22-year-old medical student, able to speak in a doctor’s shorthand and advocate for her care while my father and I floundered.Ever since my mum died in 2013, family photos have been a source of bittersweet pain...

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68 h. ago My favourite family photo: ‘I can still feel my mother’s arm around my shoulder’

I love the way we are both looking in astonishment at my son. It shows the unwavering support she gave me when he was bornThis picture of my mother, me and my eldest son, Theo, was taken the morning after he was born in May 2002, in University College Hospital, London.There are a lot of things I love about it. I love the fact my mother is exquisitely dressed – she’s wearing her pearls! She always looked very elegant at this time in her life and enjoyed clothes (we bought that suit on a day out together). I love the composition too – our three dark heads, faces in profile and the way our three hands are aligned. I love the miracle of my son’s intricate little shell of an ear, the nose (his dad’s) and lips (mine) still visible now in his 23-year-old face. Continue reading...

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3 d. ago My favourite family photo: ‘I was six, with mumps and diarrhoea – and having the time of my life’

When I went to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s to see my Dad it felt like visiting another planet. But beyond the scale and shininess of the country was the feeling of my family finally being togetherIn the 1980s, the British construction industry was hit hard by recession. At the same time, Saudi Arabia had the opposite problem; lots of money and a desire to build infrastructure, but not enough skilled workers. As a result, thousands of British labourers found it was the only place where they could earn a wage. My dad – freshly out of work with a young family to support – was one of them. We travelled out to see him twice, once to Riyadh and once to Jeddah.Objectively, the Riyadh trip was better. Dad lived on a worker’s compound, and there was a pool and a restaurant and loads of room to run around. Jeddah, less so – but that’s where this photo was taken. Dad shared a tiny flat on the city’s noisy Palestine Street with one of his colleagues. I caught mumps basically upon landing and (acc...

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3 d. ago My favourite family photo: ‘My mother stares dreamily into the distance, looking like an extra from Mad Men’

I found solace in looking through my father’s slides after he died. They made me gasp – and my childhood turned from monotonous monochrome to glorious TechnicolorWhen my sister handed me a box of old Kodachrome slides last summer, I almost didn’t bother looking through them. Unusually for pre-smartphone times, my camera-crazy father had extensively documented our lives, filling dozens of photo albums. What could the transparencies possibly reveal that we hadn’t already seen countless times? I dimly remembered him ambushing us to watch slideshows, until we were old enough to rebel.My father died in 2012. Not long before, I had developed an interest in photography myself and, after he was gone, I found solace in my viewfinder. It was, and still is, a way of feeling connected to him. What prompted me to set up my iPad as a makeshift lightbox to view the slides was technical interest. Continue reading...

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4 d. ago My favourite family photo: ‘I bucketed 30 years of tears that day – then smiled my smiliest smile’

After more than three decades together, Simon Hattenstone and his partner Diane Taylor decided to have a civil partnership. It was a beautiful celebration before the shock of the pandemicDiane and I had been living together for more than 30 years, and our children were 28 and 26 when we got civilled. We’d never wanted to get married. It seemed a bit too pipe and slippers. It also felt like tempting fate. We were really happy without being married, so why change things? And you can’t have more of a commitment than children. But we always said if they introduced civil partnerships for heterosexual couples, we’d get civilled.I think friends assumed we did it primarily for tax reasons – to ensure that if one of us died, the other wasn’t left in the shit. There was an element of that. But more importantly, we actively wanted to get civilled. It actually felt really romantic – tying the civil knot as an expression of love after all this time together. It was such a beautiful day, in every...

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