OK – I expect this will win the cackest picture to ever appear on pbase but I don’t care, it means a great deal to me.

I have always liked to give guests to my home something to look at when they visit the ‘smallest room’. In my first place, I painted a mural on the walls of the loo. It’s a long story but suffice to say, the place was a complete wreck (so nothing changes there then) and I discovered after pulling four hundred and eighty seven layers of wallpaper off the loo walls, that the lath and horsehair plaster partition wall was falling apart. I was stony broke (so nothing changes there then) and so I decided my only option was to re-plaster it myself.

Needless to say, my plastering was completely pants (nothing changes there either) and in order to take people’s eyes away from the poor quality of the plastering, I painted a mural on the walls so visitors were treated to a snowy night-time alpine scene! It was legendary…..well in my lifetime anyway.

In Sandhurst, I hit on the idea of a rogues’ gallery to entertain my guests. The downstairs loo there had all of these pics and more (some have been ‘kicked downstairs’ onto the kitchen wall here) all around the walls. They are a sort of higgledy-piggledy mini-chronicle of my life and loves…strangely (or not as the case may be), new visitors to the house always disappeared in there and spent ages looking at my history on the walls.

Today, I’ve been bashing nails into the ghastly tongue and groove board that is our new airing cupboard to house the collection. As an aside, one of the previous occupants of this house LOVED tongue and groove with such a passion that almost the whole house is plastered with it. Urgh. Still, on the bright side at least with the tungsten light you can’t really see how bright the blue gloss paint that someone else decided was a great way to cheer it up….

To the left of the doors, from the top, are several childhood shots of me and my little sister, including one with our ‘adopted sister’ Karen (and my Mum, when she was a lot younger than I am now) too. There’s one of me and Claz pretending to have been caught in bed together, which we thought was completely hilarious at the time….no comment! There are also solo ones of the two of us, the sultry(!) one of me was taken by her when we were trying to impress pop stars! There is also one with my head transposed onto Linda Lusardi’s (UK topless model) body and the caption ‘Linda is fantastic in plastic’ that Paul Christian did for me as a birthday pressie many moons ago.

On the right of the doors are several weddings – Susie, Laura and my little sis, several of DM, more of Claz and Shaz (P.Y.B.A.S. founder members girls), lots of dooogs, me cuddling a real-live koala, me with my precious Tobes on Rhosneiger (I think that’s how you spell it) Beach. As has always been my way, I’m on a beach in blazing sunshine, dressed from head to foot in black, with almost NO skin showing at all…..and that was when I had the body to die for! How I regret not getting my kit off in public while I could – these days, having gone ‘the way of all flesh….in other words, south’ I’d rather die!!!!!

These photos are a little patchwork quilt of what makes me who I am. They’re full of love and joy….and some are tinged with a little bit of sadness too – I still find it hard to look at that pic of me and Toby and feel anything other than the wrenching pain of his loss. That was one of the happiest moments of my life. Me and him on a beach, in the sunshine, cuddled up together with a book…..if DM had been there, I wouldn’t have been able to contain my joy but I had a lot of years to wait for that pleasure.

Ooohhh 'eck - today didn't go how I'd planned at all.....I was planning a thing about the history of photo a day seeing as I've finished my third year of this stuff today - blimey - I could've picked a better pic to commemorate the end of three years.

So, in a nutshell....the photo a day thing has been going on for donkeys' years...the earliest online ones I can find are from 1998 and interestingly there is at least one person who is still doing it all these years later. The first on pbase was David, in December 2002, followed by Karen Nichols and Nikki Harman on Jan 1 2003. Then me on 8th March 2003. Then quite a few others started all around the same time, including lots whose names I can't recall, Patrick, CJ, Jeanne, Greg Morris and Paul Walters, whose gallery grew quickly in popularity, I suspect because of its 'glamour' content and that undoubtedly sucked in a lot more PADDERS. By mid-2004, there were over a hundred people doing it on pbase. It's grown and grown since then, perhaps because the meta-gallery engages people, who knows.