Picture This

They say that a picture paints a thousand words. What would you say if I told you that photographs spew out a whole lexicon - literally? Never heard of a talking photograph? I wish I hadn’t.

I mean, sure, you do get these AI induced talking photos nowadays, but there is an intermediary process involved. You have to put words into their mouths in the first place. At least at the moment. When AI gets to access written documentation and extrapolate around it, that's when it starts to get really creepy.

For the rest of you, that is. 

Me? Been there, done that, got a whole wardrobe full of tee shirts and the horror stories that go with them. It all started like this.

First off: you've all probably heard of people who, for some reason - usually involved with some sort of trauma - wake up and start speaking in a foreign accent or in a foreign language entirely? It's like that. Sort of.

Except, with me, there was no trauma involved at all so far as I’m aware. I just woke up one morning after a heavy night with the lads and my grandad said ’gerrup ya lazy bugger’ in that gruff miner's tone that passes for deep affection in these parts. I mean, the old sod has been dead for 15 years, so either the hangover is much worse than I anticipated or I'm hallucinating. But no. 

Now, call me sentimental, but I was very fond of the old guy, and I keep a framed photo of him in the bedroom - mainly because there's a cracking nurse pushing his wheelchair who I almost pulled before she ran off with the Consultant - but, you know, he was all right was grandad.

And, that morning, he wished me what passes for 'good morning sunshine’ in his old miner’s vernacular. I mean, I saw his lips move. And he winked. And it was the same every morning. He never said anything else, just that gruff injunction. It was better than an alarm clock..

I don’t mind saying, it fair put the willies up me that first morning but I still half thought it was the hangover, but when it happened the next morning and the morning after and the morning after that I began checking everywhere for hidden microphones. With a baseball bat in my hand. 

And then, probably because it was only grandad, I started to get used to it - it was nice hearing the old man speak again. Mind you, if he’d started wishing me ‘goodnight’ and enquiring after my love life as well I don’t know what I would have done. When I challenged some of my mates about it, they denied all knowledge and looked at me as though I were mad. Perhaps I was. I began to think so, but nothing untoward happened so I let it go and learned to live with it.

When I think back now, it was almost as if that was a sort of trial run for whatever it was that was afflicting me. 

But it was when our Aiden started swearing at me I began to worry. Not that I keep a photo of Aiden in the bedroom. I don’t think even Aiden’s wife keeps a photo of him … anywhere.

Nasty piece of work is Aiden. I’m ashamed to call him family. Practically everyone is, and anyway he was currently banged up, so he couldn’t have been lurking behind the doors just waiting for an opportunity to pitch in whenever he saw his photo pop up. Not that I would want his photo to pop up - it just popped out of an album when I was sorting a few things out and fell into a pint of beer I’d just put on the coffee table. 

Now, you wouldn’t have thought that wallowing up to the ears in alcohol would give anyone cause to curse, especially Aiden given his current circumstances, but curse he did. And it doesn’t bear repeating. And it didn’t stop until I hoiked him out and dried him off … and then dropped the photo as if it was a hot brick when he curled his lip at me. What he said then was quite offensive, if not anatomically impossible - and very loud. I shoved him back inside the album before the neighbours started banging on the walls whereupon he shut up. Which should have taught me a valuable lesson, but me being me …

What with grandad and Aiden, I started to experiment with other photos in the album. Not all of them chipped in. It seemed to be only those with whom I had had a close connection at first - and I suppose I did have a close connection with Aiden when we were kids. 

I mean, you couldn’t actually have a conversation with any of them. It was very much a one-sided affair and a lot of what they said didn’t seem to make a lot of sense until I realised that their utterances seemed to relate to some defining moment in their lives. Like Glenda Johnson, for instance. 

Now, Glenda wasn’t family but it wasn’t for want of trying. We’d had quite a thing back in the day. She was married now, with getting on for a football team of kids, and what she said to me when I turned up her photo made me understand why that was. I mean, I’m no prude, but there are lengths to which even I won’t go. I was well off out of that on reflection, and the bloke she was with now was either a masochist or matched her for sexual degradation which was the only explanation I could put on it.

I toyed with the idea of making some money out of the phenomenon at one point, but I would have had to digitise the photos to do anything like that and, oddly enough, it was only printed photographs that worked. Digital images didn’t have much to say for themselves, except for spouting a string of numbers at you that is, which I suppose a computer programmer could have made sense of, but maths has never been my strong point, so that was dead in the water to start with.

Anyway, I tried demonstrating to a few mates, turning over random photos to get their reaction. They just looked at them - and me - blankly, and some of the less sympathetic started surreptitiously edging away. Apparently it was only to me that the photos had anything to say. And I do wonder why. What on earth am I supposed to do with some of the information that comes my way? Because some of it seems to be quite important even given the brevity of the message.

And it didn’t stop with family. Soon, even unrelated photos started putting in their contribution, and it made walking past billboards in the street a nightmare, with a cacophony of voices following me. But it was beginning to feel like normal by now and I’d more or less learned to live with the chatter. It was when the screaming started that things started to get edgy.

I was idly leafing through a magazine on the Afghan War - I should have known better - when a photo of this handsome young warrior smiling from the page suddenly turned into a howling grimace of pain and he started screaming such that it sent a shiver down my spine and my bowels turned to water. I hastily turned the page to shut him off and read on to find that he had had all his limbs torn off and half his face had disappeared, leaving him a living torso. And there were more of that ilk. I tossed the magazine aside and vowed never to look at another image ever again.

But that’s practically impossible in this image conscious age, although I do avoid those most likely to have something horrible or disgusting to scream about. Mind you, I do it for light relief sometimes because you do tend to get to the essential truths behind individual personalities, however limited the conversation might be. Most celebrities, for instance, deliver their message in verbal lowercase with ME! ME! ME! writ large behind them, quite often with a sneering tone underlying. 

That goes double for politicians. And when it comes to world leaders, you don’t really want to know. You really don’t. I tried Trump and Biden recently and there’s nothing to choose between them, even given the fluff that Biden has for brains. And not a lot of what Trump says makes any sense whatsoever anyway. I think he’s invented his own dictionary and whatever it is that’s driving this thing has given up trying to interpret it.

As for Putin, Xi Jinping and the Mad Mullahs … and Kim Jong Un of course … the least said the better when you’ve filtered out the filthy dogma that spews from their lips.

I should say, though, after my latest one-sided conversations with them, if you’ve got any long term plans and dreams for the future I’d suggest you achieve them in the shorter term rather than wait … because you might not get to achieve them at all.

That’s all I’m saying.

In a way, for me, it would be a blessed relief.