FebulousFebruary 2026: The Old Photograph

Tom and Elsie

Once upon a time, before Artificial Intelligence depicted non-people in a landscape determined by online popularity; before Photoshop rebuilt the view, your nose, or your whole wedding into a clickbait meme….

Before watches and phones took photographs (ask your Gran) as a means of recording every mundane daily activity ( lunch!  fun with my girlie gang!  Mum’s haircut fail!!) to be shared with everyone you have ever known, via the cloud , to prove what a wonderful life you are living.

When only cameras took photos,  but the physical film had to be removed , processed and printed by experts (or Boots the Chemists)…and then, the  breathless wait to collect and unwrap them to see if any had come out well. And not, in any way, like Mum’s legendary roll of 36 underexposed pictures of her right eye. To be placed in an album or cardboard box, dated on the back (Butlins, 1964. Annette’s wedding, 1990). A store of memories, more fragile and precious than the pictures.

And even earlier, when cameras were a rare luxury, and photos  (black-and-white) were staged in expensive studios with props – pianos, toy yachts, aspidistras –  posed, serious and almost lifeless. Photos, then, were for special occasions – holidays, weddings, coming-of-age.  How magical they seemed, copying reality so accurately: “The camera never lies”. But it told its own particular truth, to be reinterpreted by every viewer.

Over the fireplace, in a cracked and faded wooden frame sit Uncle Tom and Auntie Elsie. He looks dapper. He was not; his eyes watered, and had a clubfoot in a built up shoe, but in the frame he looks kind, happy and besotted with his recent wife. She was myopic,  jamjar bottom glasses and a problematic perm, but she looks happy – and they match, just as they did in real life. They invested the time and the hard-earned money to visit a studio, to be posed and photographed in greyscale then coloured in …with the wrong colours; a ghastly green dress, hair a too-excitable auburn.  An impressionist portrait more real than reality.  But the love is exactly the right colour and it is beautiful. They smile down the decades, and we cannot fail to smile back. We remember them as they really were – Elsie’s legendary gravy, Tom’s enthusiastic  repetitions of speech. Although no gravy is visible in this photo.

I have a Tom and Elsie photo of you and me. I don’t remember who took it, or what happened to that favourite shirt. I can barely remember the feel of my arm around you. But I remember the times, the endless sun, the passion. One day, I hope someone studying lesbian histories will find it in its beautiful wooden frame and say “well, we don’t know who these two women were…friends? lovers? sisters? but we can see the love. We can see that they love, they match… they belong.” 

 Yes, we did. And that is beautiful.

Fin, age 69¾ , Eighton Banks

Out of focus

It’s an old photo—early noughties maybe.

She’s half‑hidden at the back of a group,

so when they crop her out and blow her up

she turns grainy, ghost-soft.

Still, she’s smiling.

She looks happy.

But now—

Missing since last Saturday.

Concerns for her Safety.

Her name on posters,

her face the same one from that night

A whole life reduced to an old photo,

the last time the world caught her in focus. 

Invisible since.

Naomi Smith, Whitstable

The Old Photograph,

Memories contained,

Flashes of hope and love

Colourful smiles

Laughter

Happy faces,

A modern snap,

I remember those close to me.

The Old Photograph,

Maybe in sepia tone,

Who is it?

Relatives of years gone,

Stoic postures, 

Hardened faces

Bodies built for work,

An era gone by.

The Old Photograph,

Black and white,

A lass standing on a pier,

Hair flying in the wind

She looks happy, content,

Babe in arms.

The war is over.

Memories contained.

Lauren, Christchurch, Aotearoa

Heron Road

We three stand in a photograph

creased at the corners,

A cramped city garden.

Our hair cropped close,

dykes, not gay girls.

Hands in pockets, feet planted wide,

leather and denim,

claiming space with confidence.

We did call it butch then—

and we knew we could be butch and women,

unafraid of being seen.

The photograph does not show

what came next.

The lovers who stayed,

the ones who left,

the ones we buried too early.

Now we look at it

our faces changed

by grief, by weather, by joy.

Some of us are thicker, slower, greyer.

What surprises me most

is not how much we have changed,

but how much we remain the same.

The tilt of a chin.

The defiance in the eyes.

Time has not erased us.

It has strengthened us.

It has taught our love new verbs:

to endure, to forgive,

to remember who stood where

when it mattered.

And in the photograph,

young, lit from the side,

we are still waiting

not for approval,

but for someone to look long enough

to see what was always there:

women who knew who they were,

and never needed permission

to take up space.

Kate, Ceredigion

The old photograph.

My two sisters and me. 8, 7 5 years of age. Yes, that’s our photograph. In black white, grainy with brown edges curdled up by the passage of time. Little by little as the clock ticks we grew apart. Boyfriends became husbands for them. One had children the other did not. I married to and left them. Time passes, ties loosen and those remembered childhood days recede into the tunnel of the past. Yet my brotherly love endures. Until that is, until, it became a sisterly love. 

The summer days that year of the photograph were filled with the joys of being with my girlfriend. Little like me, of age 5,  she wore a white bow in her blond hair and the prettiest of gossamer dresses.  As the summer wore on the rows of potato plants grew and outstretched their leaves toward the blue skies of memory. We would walk among them, row by row holding hands. That old photograph, such happy memories of my first love. 

School days came between us and my memory is jogged to a curious event. It is clear, vivid etched in memory. The days when cars of the very rich were invariably black, stupendously large, not a car as we know it today but a magnificent four wheeled carriage. Such a car stopped beside me. Remember this is the old photograph days. I was little, vulnerable. The door opened to reveal a portly gentleman his face deeply creased by time. He wore a top hat. He admirably suited the car. Both being vintage. This gentleman of all things pulled from his pocket, to my absolute delight a small white paper bag. In those days a child would instantly know the bag held boiled sweets. Sold loosely, and dispensed from an array of large glass jars in a “sweet” shop. I held my breath, he sat and tapped his walking stick impatiently. I didn’t step into the car (l now realise to have been a Rolls) as my mum stated never to accept anything from a stranger. I remember being terribly disappointed. l wanted those sweets  My mum had instilled in me a fear of strangers. Yet, I thought of myself as being cowardly ..

One day during those old photograph days my father brought home an old alarm clock. From this innocent beginning l was to be discovered. My life long yearning was already in place. Needless to say, l loved bright things, colours, flowers all together these “feminine” traits which were so apparent. My father called me sissy. I suppose l was. So it seemed of much and great importance to have my hair cut to as short as possible. This upset me greatly yet my father, it seemed to satisfy him a great deal. I digress, you see the alarm clock became mine. I was to contract a life threatening illness from it. It’s former owner suffered from Scarlet Fever. A very severe disease in those days. I was quickly dispatched by ambulance to an isolation ward at Nottingham City hospital. 

My recovery was long, painful and boring. That is until the day of my discovery. I simply wanted to dress as a girl. I wanted to be one. I wore my mum’s clothes. I lay for a long time in bed at home wearing her dresses. While still recovering from the illness l was brought to new level of awareness about who l was, what l was meant to be. It frightened me, yet it brought about, years later, the new me.

Yes, the old photograph. It recalls my brotherly love.

That new photograph of the three sisters replacing the old has yet to be made. There is great doubt that it ever will. 

Patricia Thompson, Nottinghamshire 

OUT OF THE FRAME: The holiday snap.

Beyond the rectangle of that joyous moment: the celebration, the harmony and familial joy,

We might see –

If only light could bend around the corner…

that fast approaching darkly-laden cloud;

the ugly cabled pole,

As well as:

litter,

Car parks,

Mobile homes

And the general mess of man.

And in that concentrated moment,

The grimace from two minutes past

 Has now transformed into a beaming smile,

Where all the accumulated tensions from six hours of barely speaking

Have now evaporated.

And so this glossy little record 

now belies the enduring anxiety that this is:

our holiday,

our marriage,

our lives?

It belies the harsh realisation that this has been our only shot at life,-

And if we do not smile and posture

Then others might glimpse the inner fear

That  maybe, we have got it all so very wrong.

Ian, Powys.

Mostly….it was enough

I find the photograph in a box
that smells musty and of winters long finished.
There we are, balanced on the edge of becoming,
smiling as if the world was ready for us.

We thought we had discovered everything.
Love was a warm jacket passed between us,
friendship an infinite room
where no one ever had to leave.
History had not yet learned our names –

We were sure it would.

We posed without armour.
Naive, yes, but luminous with it.
Innocence that is not ignorance
but belief, unguarded.
We imagined photographs were nets,
that nothing precious could slip through

Though some did. 

Where are they now I wonder?

I study those faces,
how fiercely we carried our bodies,
how desire hovered like breath on glass,
seen only if you knew how to look.
We were young lesbian women
just as the phrase began to feel truth in our mouths.

What I miss is not the youth itself
but the way time had not yet cursed back.
The future was a blank notebook
and we wrote in it with laughter.

The photograph does not know what came next.
It cannot warn us or forgive us.
It only keeps us there,
bright, foolish, brave,
holding each other as if it would always be enough.

Lel Meleyal

Three total gems from three great writers Janet Jones, Kendra Houseman and last and most definitely not least, Val Johnson

back to back to finish FebulousFebruary 2025 in style!

Earworm

So I have an earworm playing in my head most days,

Maybe from something on the radio or a song playing in shop, background noise as I aimlessly wander the aisles.

It’s funny because last night on a tv show there was a person in a supermarket desperately searching for a product, it got me to thinking about times and people I have done just that with, argued about which product, whether we have enough money, who will push the cart, who likes a leisurely shop, who wants to just get on with it and get home, car piled up with bags or once upon a time wrists turning read with the dig of the plastic bag handles. I remember lovers and friends through shopping experiences, some hate it some dawdle along the aisles in aimless misery, others excited possibilities of a new product to cook, clean, or create with. I randomly met up with an older woman I had not seen for years once, such a joy like it’s the new neighbourhood corner where people pass by somewhere in every country every day. So in my writing I have managed to dislodge that particular earworm and now I’m a bit sad because I can’t quite remember what it was..probably it will be back one of these days.

Janet Jones, Brighton 

                  

**************

Gaslighting yourself 

When you belive your own lies 

Hear your own sighs

So hard in victim mode 

That you don’t realise 

Your gaslighting yourself 

And then the usual nonsense 

It’s you not me 

Plain to see

What could I do? 

The problem was you 

Because how can it be me?

What… you want me to take accountability? 

Half hearted reflection 

Poor me rejection 

Back hand apology

And some double Dutch psychology 

When actually 

The truth B

Is that it’s time to take some responsibility

The lessons are learned 

The fingers are burnt 

Morally driven choices 

Downed out by frustrated voices 

And we move on

Of course we do 

But trust me 

This time it was 100% you

Kendra Houseman, Kent

                    *************

Deep sea solace

 “Throwing handfuls of pebbles in showers of sparks under the starlit sky” Derek Jarman

 

The huge white face of the snow moon 

Hung there in the still black velvet of the sky

 

Throw a pebble in the brine, she said

For every pain that cut your heart

And the calm of the ocean will heal you 

 

We gathered stones then, 

And cast them high into the air,

Watching the sparks that flew as they fell.

 

The bigger ones, the mother stones, 

We held in our hands and threw them

Far into the waiting sea

 

My eyes stung with salt tears

As the aches of my life

Flew with them to sink in the deep

 

And the gleaming disc of the winter moon

Watched kindly from the still black velvet of the sky

 

Val Johnson, Herne Bay 

Lost and Found

Lost my way and found a new direction  

Lost my mindset and found a library of unread books

Lost my love and found sharp heartbreak

Found myself and lost the fear 

forever 

Jackie Dunn, Edinburgh

Harm

Do you ever or have you ever considered harming yourself?

So asks the friendly whilst distant and contained person on the other end of the phone.

‘No’ I say and then ‘well maybe a bit when I was a teenager’

I have always said I would never put my friends and family through that and I still feel that. But now we’ve got the experience of someone who could and did, I’m upset but I don’t really have a capacity for the anger it just sits right there, a solar plexus of nausea wrapped up with tears that never quite make it out. I’m too weary and silenced by the knowledge of the choice you made and a depth of fatigue which never lightens and never leaves, I don’t want to sit here with these thoughts so I won’t, I’m going, not like you went, now, get the fuck out of my head.

Janet Jones , Brighton