I’ve just found a slide. I’ve been looking for it for about, oh, I don’t know, maybe three years.
It was taken in Malaysia in 1989, on a quick trip across the causeway from Singapore while en-route to Sydney for a summer school. It’s a photograph of three kids, standing excitedly on the stilted walkways of Kukup, a little fishing/tourist village that to western eyes is unbelievably romantic. Two boys are gleefully waving scraps of paper into the lens, one bolder than the other: a girl hangs back, hiding a coy smile behind her hand.
The scraps of paper read ‘Please will you send me some stamps OK Thankyou,’ with an address. Stamp-collecting was, it seems, a huge craze at the time. I still have the scrap of paper, but the slide had gone missing. It’s a little dark and the composition is borderline, but it’s still the best picture I’ve taken: as soon as funds permit, I shall have it printed up.
I wonder what happened to the kids, when the parcel of obscure old stamps we sent them turned up, out of the blue, months later. Heh. Treasure!
Note to self: it’s on the hall shelves, ya numbskull.