Dear John

I always used to put up various of my photos for you as a screensaver on the PC.  I was a bit more au fait with the computer – I’m not sure that you would have known how to do it.

I did it as a way of showing you a photo I particularly liked, maybe that had got taken recently.  Either somewhere we’d both been together, or maybe when I’d taken it alone and wanted to show you.

I would leave a photo for a few days, until I thought you’d definitely seen it, and would then change it for something new.

So it would sort of be a little message between us, a little extra way of me communicating something I wanted you to see and admire, I suppose.

I would enjoy selecting photos that I thought you’d like, that would have some significance to you.

It took a bit of playing around, always, cropping the photo it a particular way so that it wouldn’t get stretched out to look unnatural.

Some of the screensavers I particularly remember were: the lovely photo of me and you side by side which got taken at the Prater wheel in Vienna; a beautiful bunch of flowers which you bought me a year or so ago, which had lovely big yellow sunflowers in it; a view of people walking along a beach in the distance, on the Isle of Wight; the Isle of Wight teddy bear sitting on the edge of the ferry on the crossing home; a picture of a parrot, on the right hand side, with blurry green background on the left (a good screensaver picture had a certain composition, with a blank area towards the left hand side so that the desktop icons would be clearly visible).

Recently I had the photo of me riding a horse in Menorca up for some time.  The original version had some horsepoo in it, which I subsequently managed to photoshop out.  I swapped it over and asked you to spot the difference once – I was so proud of myself for having worked out how to do it.

And once I put up a photo of you sleeping in the garden, which I’d taken secretly, and you really didn’t like it and objected, so I had to remove it quickly.

But as soon as this awful thing happened, John, as soon as you went into hospital, I stopped doing the screensaver thing.  I took down what was there and left a blank blue screen, and it’s still blank now.

It was too painful, that you weren’t there to see my chosen pictures any more.

You never will be.