I actually set out this morning (I am writing on 31 August 2017) to Ogblog 31 August 1997, in the form of a “what were you doing the day that Princess Diana died?” That I shall do once this piece is writ…now done – click here!
But once I realised that Janie and I went to a Greenwich tavern to meet John Random and Jenny Mill on 31 August 1997…
…and then realised that my previous visit to Greenwich for such purposes must have been about 20 years earlier…
…and then looked up that my previous visit had been EXACTLY twenty years earlier…
…I thought I’d better Ogblog both anniversaries and start with the earlier of them.
Here is a link to the Flickr album with the photos we took on those three days.
The diary page helped me a lot with this one:
I had wondered, when looking at the photo batch, whether I had got some negatives mixed up, as it looked to me as though some pictures of my dad in Brighton had got mixed up with a day trip to Greenwich.
But the diary reminds me that we went to Greenwich twice, going to Brighton on the day in-between.
That summer was the first time in my childhood that we had no family holiday.
Dad must have been very short of money at that time – the business had been doing badly for a few years by then. Dad probably couldn’t justify the expense of getting someone else to run the photographic shop for any amount of time during those commercially better end of summer weeks, even if he could have afforded the holiday itself…which he probably couldn’t.
So he/we simply took a long bank holiday weekend – I suspect he just kept the shop closed until the Thursday.
I have done this as a photo piece using the picture captions to tell the tale; I think the pictures themselves tell most of the story.
The diary suggests that we very much enjoyed our lunch at the Trafalgar Tavern.
Probably we enjoyed the lunch so much so that we didn’t get to see all the things we’d intended to see in Greenwich that day.
On 30 August, we went to Brighton. Only three photos from there that day – all of my dad being blown or blowing in the wind:
We clearly decided to return to Greenwich to finish our sightseeing on 31 August. We took lunch in the Cutty Sark this time, which I don’t think we liked as much as the Trafalgar Tavern back then, if I am reading between the lines of my diary correctly.
The weather looks miserable in the 31 August pictures, as does my mum:
