Recently it was shown absolutely penultimate episode of the phenomenal series Happy Valley on SVT.
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In the absolutely penultimate showdown between our hero Catherine Cawood and her vile but beautiful nemesis Tommy Lee Royce, he gives up. He’s bleeding from a fatal wound to his stomach, bruised and bruised, having swallowed a couple of maps of pills and washed down with copious amounts of golden liquor. In a powerful finale, he drowns himself in gasoline, pulls out his last match and aims it at his handsome self.
Catherine waits a second before throwing herself over him with a blanket. In the hours before the brutal end, Tommy has been sitting in an armchair and flipping through two albums with pictures of his son.
I thought to myself: two albums, is that all they have? Then I looked at my warm cell phone in my hand, the one that has to work overtime because I have eighty thousand pictures in it.
Eighty thousand.
The week before this spent in beautiful Gotland and took a thousand or so pictures of my children and Gotland views which I’m sure I can find nicer versions of on the internet. Why do I need my own picture of a rauk?
In the evenings, I had thought I would write on my new novel or read someone else’s old one. HAVE! Instead, I sat and deleted pictures until only pretty ones remained. Then I went to bed with a sore thumb.
Think there was a time when you had to get it right on the first try. Consider, when you look in old albums and see your sweet mother, that it was by chance and luck that she became so beautiful. She had no foundation, no filter, a bad camera and no chance to delete bad photos. If she closed her eyes, she did so in the album and further into eternity. What sweet grandma was completely her own machine, your children might say and you almost apologize that you didn’t come out better.
Is it any wonder that we women think we are ugly when we have so many chances to be something else?
When we got home from Gotland, six pictures of a different character were waiting outside the front door. My cousin Kalle had left large framed photographs of what I believe to be my great-grandmother and such. I met my requester’s gaze and thought: this is your picture. Your only picture. You really only had one chance. In your black robe, your tight scarf and your straight mouth.
That she only has one picture says as little about her life as it says about my life that I have phones and computers littered with pictures of me and my family. What is the first thing you would save if your house was in flames? For Catherine Cawood, it was the two albums. She wore them tightly close to her chest as she left Tommy in a smoking heap behind her.
I don’t think I’ll run in for the phone, when will I ever manage to sort through eighty thousand pictures?
However, my eternal clicking hangs heavy in the cloud above me.
I carry my great-grandmother under my arm.