A Single Image from an Old Magazine

August, 1965. An advertisement for Youthlines Qform by Mary Quant. Lycra, stretch straps, elastic lace. Liberties taken with clarity and contrast, and flipping horizontal. It's over 50 years ago. So much has intervened.

The twitching of venetian blinds to see what is going on in the neighbourhood is not limited exclusively to those of retirement age.

Your name in a telephone directory. Beautiful young women being photographed for a living. It is all temporary. It all changes. Barthes' Camera Lucida develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum: studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it. The studium category is really quite wide. The punctum category, on the other hand, is by contrast exclusively about emotional reaction. Related particularly to portraiture, the ultimate effect of punctum is the intimation of death. The essence of photography is the implied message: ''That has been.''

Anne's life had changed so much that earlier worries concerning custody of the picnic hamper and the tidiness of the tent interior had been forgotten. All she had now was an old Start-Rite shoe box containing things she felt were somehow important: an old copy of 'Bunty' with its back page which featured a cut-out doll and paper clothes bearing a handwritten addition 'We are lesbians'. She could not remember who had written it. There were several old bus tickets with the words 'Send Your Parcels By Country Bus' printed on the back of a few. A small well-thumbed booklet about hygiene in adolescence had an obscene drawing scrawled on the back cover with the name 'Peter!' added underneath. There was an almost exhausted orange-coloured lipstick in a tarnished gold-coloured tube with a broken push-up slide. It had a pleasant smell. Stuck to an oozing bar of Highland Toffee was a ten-shilling note. They appeared to be inseparable. And there was The Photograph. Snapped at Lulworth using Julian's expensive camera it showed George wearing a one-piece swimming costume crouched down by a dripping Timmy and smiling broadly. George could no longer get away with wearing just boys' swimming trunks, which irked him occasionally. Anne gazed at it often wondering did she admire George because George masqueraded as a boy, or was it because she knew full well that George was a girl. It was a mystery with the answer as yet unrevealed.

Through the medium of telepathy the secret code is silently transferred between the agents.

A beautiful woman from the 1960s. A draughty old rectory where rocking horses in the abandoned nursery occasionally begin to move entirely on their own. Dusty windows unopened since The Abdication. Snatches of spidery sound from downstairs where Neville Chamberlain is announcing that Part Two of the tragedy is about to start in the main theatre. A Spitfire roaring overhead. A cold breeze in the churchyard beyond as the ground shifts in anticipation of more untimely deaths. A shudder down the spine of the agency model as she gets dressed, and a hurried exit by the photographer leaving without a word of farewell. Autumn leaves swirling round her feet as she hurries for the bus. A pony and trap passing with a coffin in the back. It is history and it repeats itself in a macabre mosaic across time.