According to a certain school of thought, 'The unexamined life is not worth living'. But what if you put this proposition to your dog as he or she lay stretched out in front of the fire after a good meal of bones and with a walk and game of ball in the offing, to be followed by more bones and another snooze? Your dog, having never in its entire leaping, tongue-lolling, joyous, panting, adoring life submitted itself to even a nano-second’s self scrutiny, would look at you with that expression that respectfully suggested, 'Human beings are so dumb'.
But if the virtues (or otherwise) of the unexamined life are still in contention, what about the undeveloped life? Let me explain.
Last Christmas my wife gave me a marvellous, compact digital camera. Photographs of a remarkable clarity can now be brought up on the computer screen or turned into beautiful portraits in the local chemist using equipment that tells you to go and have a coffee while it gets on with the complex stuff. But it was not always thus. This camera is the final throw of our photographic dice.
Another Christmas much longer ago, my wife and I decided to buy ourselves a decent camera. Not one of those that required a Ph.D. to operate, but an idiot-proof little box with one button that you pushed when ready, and preferably a robotic voice that said at appropriate moments, 'Your hair is falling across the lens', or 'Do you really want a photo of your left foot?' We felt we should be recording significant stages of our lives but this project was routinely sabotaged by our old camera — a hefty, complicated machine made, I think, in France. By Daguerre.
Does that sound right? It was too heavy to lug around, it had a shutter that moved with the speed of a roller door and was twice as noisy, and the pictures would have been fine if given Turneresque titles like, 'Rain and Fog at Midnight,' or 'Standing Figure Obscured by Hailstorm.'
So, into the Singapore Duty Free we swept during a rushed 40-minutes parole from QF9 en route to our new life in London. We browsed, negotiated, decided. And suddenly there we were, owners of a compact, lightweight, fully automatic recorder of life’s significant stages. With a camera case thrown in and a complimentary film, the whole package cost only about two or