Who's The Daddy: The golden age when no-one was around to capture it

​Late last month daughter #1 and her friends hired a couple of boats for the sole purpose of an afternoon of messing about on Windermere.

And what could be finer than floating around on one of the most ridiculously magnificent spots on Earth, doing backflips off the stern into the cool, clear water in the early summer sunshine and generally having the time of their young lives, like they’re all characters in The Great Gatsby or something?

But waaaay back in the pre-social media days of August 1992 yours truly and his uni cronies/lifelong friends did exactly the same thing.

We had cameras alright but they were ones you put film in and we tossed them between the boats so we could snap each other in what we thought was a cross between Tron and Mad Max on Windermere.

When I dug out the pics to show daughter #1 she had a face like a dropped pie after I told her that we were all at least 18 months younger than she is now (23-and-a-half), but then she said: “So why do you all look about 40?”

Oooh, that stung.

There we were, in our prime, snapped on a pretty nifty Canon Sureshot Ace that went to all of life’s major events of the time, graduation, drunken all-nighters playing Risk in our absolute disgrace of a student house and a good-natured pitch invasion with thousands of Celtic fans at Old Trafford after Bryan Robson’s testimonial in November 1990.

We didn’t know it at the time but it was a golden age.

Unlike kids today, we made all our biggest, life-changing mistakes in the days when nobody had a video camera in their pocket with the capability to grass to future employers, spouses and children what you’d been up to when you thought no one was looking.

Amen to that, says everyone over the age of 40 reading this.

Anyway, this little camera had a remote control panel with a button on it, so we took selfies with it before selfies were even a thing.

And it stayed with me until the last night of a block release journalism course in Sheffield in March 1993 when I put it on the bar in The Howard for half a second and some bugger swiped it, with a load of great pics on it.

Hope they got a good price.

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