Gloriously Ordinary Sundays - 17th March 2024

I wanted to write a bit about Test Three this week. I came up with the idea of the photo test last year when I was walking from the station to a conference venue to speak at an event. Walking towards me was an older man with Downs Syndrome, maybe five-foot tall and walking either side of him and holding his hands were two young men in their twenties, six-foot plus, prominent lanyards, talking to each other and laughing about something over his head. They were walking about three times the speed it looked like the older man wanted to walk and he looked terrified. Take a mental image – horrible. To my shame, I didn’t stop and challenge, but the image stuck in my head, and it got me thinking about the concept of capturing a moment in time and what that tells you.

Photos have changed since I was a kid. No more the excitement of dropping a film into Boots and picking it up a few days later to relive the memories of a night out or a holiday. We wouldn’t have wasted one of our precious 36 photos on our dinner or something on offer in the supermarket. It did mean that many of my school and uni photos have an element of being posed, as we needed to consider how best to represent that amazing moment. Now we have our phones, and we can capture every moment of our day. Most of us choose to carefully edit and show the world the version of our reality that we want people to see - but often beneath the surface lies more than just the 'facts' of a photo.

I was prompted to explore the photo test by responses to my blog last week where a couple of people asked me if I really had been away on my own and did I enjoy it?  The answer is yes, and I really REALLY do love it. You could take any number of mental images from that long weekend away or indeed from other holidays that I take on my own, where you’d see me at 8 o’clock in the evening in my apartment - no radio, no telly, probably a book, maybe catching up on some emails or feeding the local cats. Lights off until it gets too dark to see. You could look at that photo and see loneliness, or compare it with an image of a group of people in the restaurant down the road, having a meal together, laughing and drinking. The truth is that photo would have shown me happy and at peace. I might have met with friends for a meal the next night, but I value and need time on my own, maybe more than the average person. So, it’s really important that we don’t judge a photo based on the fact that it is not something we would want to be doing. It might not be what you would want, but does it make the person’s heart sing?

My anxiety with test three was that people would think I was inviting workers to collect and share endless Insta-worthy photos of happy, smiling older disabled people having so much fun… don’t even get me started on the hideous photos we usually see representing social care – the wrinkly hands, the arms around each other, the fake smiles. I worry sometimes on social media about organisations sharing photos that demonstrate people visibly getting good support. There’s a fine line between celebration and self-congratulation, and I say that with love for organisations that I know well and really respect and who are working hard to enable people to have Gloriously Ordinary Lives. I could have found recent photos of The Girl to share where she is smiling and happy, but the truth is that she is mainly very sad at the moment, lonely and often really distressed. No smiling photo can paper over that or the fact that we’re not getting her support completely right at the moment.

There is something incredibly important about the nuance of the photo test. Some photos are obvious – someone visibly distressed like the older man with his young supporters, but others aren’t so clear. There are situations where it really does look like a great photo of someone enjoying themselves but if you read between the lines, it might not be quite that simple. A few years before my mum died when her world was starting to get a bit small, I persuaded her to go to our local social club for people over sixty-five that had a lunch club once a week. She took a lot of persuading (okay, I was a bit of a bully) but she went, and I took a mental picture of her as I left – sitting round the table with four other older people drinking a cup of tea and smiling. I felt pretty pleased with myself for helping her get out and make some connections. When I picked her up a few hours later, she told me that hated it and made me promise that I would never ask her to go again. My mum never made a fuss, and she would have made a real effort to appear to enjoy herself for those three hours – for my sake and for the sake of the other people there, but it was absolutely not her thing.

There is also that element of a great photo being in the eye of the beholder. Think about photos you might have taken on a night out with friends or a partner, where you’ve wanted to post particular photograph that you thought was fab and the person in question says categorically not, because ‘it’s the worst photo EVER of me’.

It’s also good to link the photo test back to the other tests, particularly where it is showing real connection or a real purpose. I looked through photos on my computer with The Boy and asked him to pick out his favourites that he’d be happy to share for this blog. There are some obvious ones – first day of work at MacDonalds, his birthday, Halloween and Shrek’s world of adventure. Oh, and his first tattoo (I say first because apparently there is definitely going to be another one). They all show evidence of his great connection and purpose.  BUT the photos at face value don’t tell you everything. They don’t tell you that he has a zero-hour contract at MacDonalds and is currently only getting one shift a week, which makes saving up for that second tattoo difficult. They don’t tell you that having people around on his birthday is great, but not for more than about an hour please - ‘good photo birthday cake. Nice party then people go home’. They don’t tell you that he’d much prefer to visit London and the Merlin attractions on his own.

 So, I guess the real challenge of test three is to dig deep behind the mental image and notice what it is telling you about the reality of that person’s life.

PS. Did you see? The Gloriously Ordinary Sundays Podcast episode two is here! I catch up with John Nicoll and we share our memories of what life looked like when The Boy and The Girl first came to live with us, and how that experienced pushed us to start defining Gloriously Ordinary Lives.