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>1,000 Words

One of the completely surprising Christmas presents I received this year came from a chap I hardly knew up until a month or so ago - James McNally of the excellent Consolation Champs blog.

I think we may have bumped into each other's blogs somewhere along the way, and one of James' other blogs (Toronto Screen Shots) came up in conversation at the office several times when we used to look after the TH!NKFilm account. James has been blogging even longer than me - he started in the summer of 2000. You could get lost for hours just browsing through his archive - it's terrific stuff.

Cutting a long story short, James and I met up for lunch just before Christmas. Excellent session in which plates of fish & chips were polished off along with a couple of pints of Guinness, and the world in general was set to rights. Pretty much what you'd expect when two Irishmen get together for a nosh.

Completely out of the blue, a few days later, James very generously made me a present of a one-year Flickr Pro subscription. A simple and easy thing to do, I guess, but what a lovely and thoughtful gift.

I've been feeling a little guilty in the last few weeks, as the time ticks down on that Pro account without me doing anything with it. So tonight I finally installed the latest Flickr upload tool and I've started squirting a handful of photos up there, getting familiar with Flickr again.

This post, then, is mainly an opportunity to thank James for the lovely thing he did, and also an excuse to point to what is one of my favourite family photos of all time.

This is my Dad and my daughter Lily, hanging out before her First Communion last year. The look of pride on Da's face says it all.



Checking in on my Flickr account just now, I see that I did actually upload this photo some time ago - but what the heck, I still love it. There's another, very similar shot, taken a few seconds later, but there's just something about this particular photo that does it.