(Marcel Proust's mammoth partly autobiographical work)

I have started 'Remembrance of Things Past' several times over the years, but have never got beyond the first 200 or so pages, which is a bit of a disadvantage since the three volumes of my 1981 Penguin edition amount to something like 3300 pages!! I have dipped in to this huge tome many times however, and read the odd passage; maybe one day I'll actually read the damn thing from front to back, start to finish!!

But the book rings true with me for a number of reasons, not least of which is the extraordinary power of the human memory, of our ability to remember things and to make sense of our present through the context of the past. And here's the thing - I've been looking through the family's old photograph albums (they go back to the 1950s) and realised that I am repeating with my kids a lot of what my mum and dad did with me and my brothers - and of particular significance to me are the holidays in Orkney. It's really something to see my kids doing the same things in the same places as me and my brothers did 40 years ago...that's cool! And it's given me (and hopefully Finn and Naomi, too) a little bit of 'place' in this unsettling and modern world, as well as a love for a special and beautiful part of the country

So here we have snapshots taken by my dad with his Rolleicord of me (and my bros) in Orkney in 1964, with a few pics of my two in Orkney...and yes, it's the same house we stay in now as it was all those years ago!

Sorry, didn't mean to be so navel-gazing and philosophical :o)...we'll be back on terra firma tomorrow, I promise!

Saturday's history-repeating-itself-but-in-a-good-way entry to the Challenge; click here for other monochromed Pbasers in January