Photo finished

I run screaming from cameras. Really, my backside is my best side, it's better this way. My dad would never allow himself to be photographed when I was growing up and I just assumed that it was some sort of Irish voodoo, that the flash image would simultaneously steal his soul and forbid him from ever finding his pot of gold. And he needed that pot of gold, by the time he was my age he had four kids, all under ten years old. But lately I've been getting more than an inkling. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to square the rugged, ornery trawler man, with a sloppy, sideways smile and a freckled weather-beaten face that I see in the mirror with the bandy legged jowly clown who acts as my photographic stunt-double. I walk miles each week, do and yes this is hilarious, sit-ups each morning, watch what I eat and drink (recently) and I can feel the changes: the tightening of the skin, the relaxing of shirts that I once wrapped around me like I was lagging a boiler. And yet in every photo there he is: Ronnie Barker with his head on fire, plumes of grey smoke billowing up from that grand canyon at dawn forehead. To be fair I look all right from the hips down, if you dont mind the slight detour of my dog leg. But I look like a man in an old fashioned cartoon who has been fleeced in the market and forced to walk home in a barrel. I dont think like this until someone shows me a photo. So no more photos. I'm depressed e-fucking-nough.