As usual, I spent part of this week volunteering at the food bank in the made-up, for the purposes of this blog, town of Melchester. On the last warm and sunny day of 2026, as per usual I wore shorts and a T shirt – I didn’t want to disappoint the ladies – which reveal parts of my sun-damaged, which is to say suntanned, body. I was chatting to a person who had been forced to come and see us because they had no food for their family and no money to pay for it whereupon they asked me: “Have you been away?” Unusually for me, I thought quickly. “Mainly the back garden,” I replied, which was partly true. The last thing I would have wanted to say was something along the lines of, “Yes, I have. We had a couple of lovely weeks in a very agreeable apartment on a Canary Island” which we had. I hadn’t lied – I try never to lie – but it was a close thing.
The last thing I wanted to do was to feel I was somehow guilty of rubbing people’s noses in it. One reason I am so committed to the fight against food poverty is because it’s personal. Had food banks existed when I was a kid, I am pretty sure we’d have used them and not just as a one-off. As it is, life was a huge struggle, particularly for my mum was regularly called by butcher and grocery shops just before they were about to close in the hope that there would be scraps and morsels she could pick up cheaply. When she couldn’t, she didn’t eat, but somehow always made sure that I did. My guilt upon finding this out later in life will never leave me. Our callers are in the same world as I used to live in. Never forget and all that.
I have the same attitude to life in general. While I am grateful to have reached a position in life whereby I can buy most of the things I want, and I can go on holiday every year, sometimes more than once, I don’t want to be seen to be boasting about it. This wasn’t always the case. My social media would find me ‘checking-in’ at various places both home and abroad, sharing endless photographs of nice views of lovely places. Why would I be doing this? Eventually, I concluded that it was totally mad. Before the internet, we used to take actual photographs which we would get developed (ask your parents, kids) and kept in a photo album. Sometimes we would show these albums to family and friends, but rarely if ever to people we hardly knew. For example, we would not take the family snaps of a lovely fortnight in Greece down to the pub, but the internet has changed all that.
It is now the norm rather than the exception for people to engage in what is known as photo dumps, sharing sometimes huge numbers of photos on social media, particularly Facebook. It is not for me to criticise anyone else’s social media habits, but my attitude these days with social media is to post as little about my personal life, apart from the odd nice view or perhaps something that was at least semi-amusing. I don’t want to be seen as either showing-off or rubbing someone else’s nose in it because there are people in my life who for one reason or another (financial circumstances, illness, disability and caring responsibilities, to name but a few) are not able to do some of the nice things I can do.
I should emphasise that this is just my take on things. It’s my blog and that’s rather the whole point of it. What I look upon, at worst, as decadent exhibitionism is merely sharing fun times and experiences for others and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m definitely not better than anyone else and probably much worse than many. But endless gurning selfies and what I consider to be oversharing, particularly photo-dumps, is not for me, at the food bank, on social media, or anywhere else for that matter. My happy days may not be yours and sometimes, as with last week’s conversation about my suntan, it’s best, for me, to leave it that way.
