Postcards from the edge

Some time ago, Cornflower asked on her blog what people did with all those cards that are much too lovely to throw away. A number of people, as I recall, replied that they used them as bookmarks, and I have a feeling that I may have bemoaned the loss of an enormous cork board that I had in my old office, which I added to regularly to make a wonderful collage of postcards, book covers, scans and even conference flyers, if they were attractive enough to merit inclusion. Now that I share an office, this is no longer possible, and at home the walls in the room where I work all support shelves, with almost no space for pictures. There's no room to display photos, either, which is why it was something of a revelation when my son gave me a digital picture frame last Christmas. This is a rectangular frame which you plug in (bit of an issue that, there aren't many plugs spare once printer, laptop, phone charger, answering machine, wireless and so on are all running, but the phone charger, at least, doesn't need to be on all the time.

Having found a spare socket, you turn the frame on and upload your photographs, so that it can play a soothing slideshow while you are working. Lovely, the dogs and chickens flick past at a leisurely rate, and offer a distraction from work and a chance to rest the eyes for a few minutes. I don't use it a great deal, but it complements my discovery that the digital camera was made for a person with shaky paws and, now that I can take the odd photo without it being a total blur, I can enjoy the fruits of my labour whenever I feel like it. Cornflower's question, though, made me think, could this be the answer to the missing cork board? I scan book jackets for my Library Thing catalogue - why not scan my favourite cards and enjoy them in the same way? So I have done a few, like this, and not only can I watch them on the digital frame, but I've put some of them in a screensaver album, and when I brood for too long over a choice of words, or can't remember how something works, I suddenly find myself enjoying a variety of old photographs and postcards.


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