Life doesn't wait for you to make the book

I take a lot of photos. What I'm bad at is everything that comes after.

I've got three kids and not much spare time. Between work and the kids and trying to maintain some sort of social life, there isn't really a free evening, and the ones that are, I'm usually too knackered to do anything useful with. So the photos just pile up. Thousands of them, sitting on my phone, doing nothing.

I have made photo books before. A handful of them, and I was quite proud of them. The problem is they stop when my middle one was about two, because making them was such a pain. Picking layouts, fiddling with the design, trying to even remember which app it was. It always turned into a whole evening's project I'd start and never finish, and after a while I just stopped opening it. Not because the books didn't matter. I'd think about doing it, then think, no, can't face it tonight, and that was that.

What I did instead was favourite photos on my phone. Usually on a plane, because that was when I had ten minutes and nothing else on. I told myself I was building up a shortlist for the next book. I never got round to it. My youngest is four now and he isn't in a single one of them. That's the bit that gets to me. He just missed the window where I was still bothering. Those with 3 kids (IYKYK)!

And even the books I made never really captured it. A photo is only part of a memory. Half of what I'd want to keep isn't a photo at all. It's the music on the drive, the video of a first wobbly step, the photo someone else took while I was too busy being there to lift my own phone. It's the trip we all snapped our way through and never put anywhere. It's the people we've lost, who I'd give anything to have properly held onto. None of that makes it into a book. The apps don't ask for it, and you'd never think to add it yourself.

So Roamoir is me building the thing I couldn't find. Something that keeps up on its own, without an evening I don't have. Something that holds onto what actually happened: what I saw, what was playing, who was there.

I'm building it because I wanted it myself. The four-year-old who still isn't in a book is, more or less, the whole reason.