I was trying to find my birth certificate this morning. It’s funny that we are supposed to live in the joined up digital world and yet …… we still need to find a bit of paper which is many years old to try and sort stuff out with the government. Grrrr.

So countless shoe boxes later, still no birth certificate (haven’t seen it in years) but I did find some old parent photographs. Black and white photos just have a special quality to them. Feels like history in your hands. Our son can look at them for hours. Tonight he will sit and drink all the history in. The sadness is that I won’t be able to add much detail to them.

It’s still hard to imagine that my dad took part in the Second World War as a young man. I really wish that I had asked more questions. Now our son if he had the opportunity would have been fantastic, he would have probed every little detail from his grandad.

But we still have old photos as our little gateway into the past. The one below is his grandad with the platoon taken during the war in Iceland.