Picture of the Day: September 2007
Back in the time machine. Now it’s September 2007, which by coincidence is 19 years ago to the day so perhaps I’ll try and do one of these a month from now on.
The top image is of a road side service stop in France. I only include it because it helps piece together a lot of the back and forth over that summer1. Presumably we were heading back to Marseille. It was a long seven hour trip, that in the days before air con (maybe around 2000 for us) was brutal.
And yep sure enough we’re back. You can see how dry it is round there. I can’t read what the sign says but usually it’s that these are roads for firemen to get through to put out wildfires.
I think this might be a place called Carro. Cute little port village with a good restaurant, Lou Mistraou - sadly closed now it seems.
You might remember the swimming pool from before. Well now it’s manky.
This is almost definitely Sausset-les-Pins. Some of my family still live there. It’s a cute sleepy fishing town, adjacent to its slightly snazzier cousin Carry-le-Rouet.
Now we’re getting into my summer job, working at my dad’s structural engineering office in Marseille. I was mostly just sorting out their total shitshow of a computer file system. I still put it on my CV just to make myself smile. Look at this fucking shit tip. All of it was like this.
What was cool about this place was it was right on the join between computers taking over and people using pen and paper. I loved seeing all the drafting tables, scale rules and rolled up drawings. Most of the senior people there at the time were still working this way, then using computers to do complex calculations.
It was interesting as quite a young person to see that people much older than me (some in their 70s) wanted me to teach them how to work the computers. I think it kind of taught me to always be curious about how shit works right to the end,
It was also an insight into French office working life. It was almost all blokes, and the atmosphere was thick with smoke, but because it was Marseille you had people from a wide variety of ethic and national backgrounds. You didn’t get this in Market Drayton.
Every morning you’d come in and shake hands with the entire place — maybe 25 people. Going out to the brasserie for lunch was common, and a 3 hour lunch was common. I never figured out the coffee system but I think the rule was that you don’t walk past someone’s door without asking if they wanted a coffee. As a result I was on probably 8 espressos a day.
This is my uncle Serge and my cousin Alex. I always thought Alex was dead cool growing up and I just looked him up and it turns out he is still dead cool and running niche French magazines up in Paris.
This is out front at my dad’s place. I think we’re getting the septic tank drained which is extremely exciting stuff.
I only chucked this in because I liked the photo. That little cybershot I had was nice.
Back at the office, where I think I found an extremely important VHS tape.
Skipping forwards a bit, I’m back in England and packing for university. I remember that after all those months away, nice as it seems now, I was usually sick of it and ready to come home.
This seems a bit too settled in to be my first day at university, but it might be day two. I took a completely unintelligible picture before this one, I guess I was pre-occupied on getting set up. I got a posh room in Cartmel College with an en-suite.
In a few days one of my nephews is just about to stop over at our place on his way up to University. It’s a while back for me but not a whole lifetime, which it is for him.
I can’t make sense of how time flies sometimes, and how old or young we feel. He seems so young to me, but I remember feeling old and a bit tired even as I got there. Looking back though what strikes me is that my life was a lot busier than I’d remembered, perhaps it makes sense I felt that way.