Remembrance

A pair of firefighters cleaning up the remnants of a van fire, down in Kent last Sunday. I would say that it's unusual events like this that prompt me to carry a camera with me pretty much whenever I leave the house, but in looking at this picture to evaluate whether I was going to post it, I noticed the fact that the firefighter's names are on the bottoms of their coats, which had completely gotten by me when I was actually at the scene.

And that brings me to another of the reasons that I carry a camera; I'm not as observant as I would like to be. Perhaps, if I hadn't been viewing the world through the small screen on the back of the camera body, I would have noticed the names, but I wouldn't place any money on that. And I'd forgotten about the Starbucks across the street until I looked at the photographs again.

I wonder how much of the world around me has slipped through my fingers, due to inattention or a memory that, sometimes, seems barely worthy of the name. And in that sense, the camera is a net, that backstops my fallible senses.