A stranger looking through my childhood photos would be nudged to two conclusions. Actually, hold it there – if someone broke into my house and started stealing my printed memories, the thieving stranger would be nudged by a row of Rottweiler teeth.

But we’re making imaginative assumptions here, so let’s just nurse the illusion that every night, before I retire to bed, I always leave a glass of milk and a welcome of home-baked cookies just in case a stranger decided to drop by in the middle of the night to find my childhood photo albums (good luck with that) and spend a jolly hour or two sniggering at my fashion-unconscious, early-1980s wardrobe.

But I digress. So, back to the stranger looking through my childhood photos and the two conclusions. The first would be that I was hardly ever a participant in family holidays. The other four members would pack their bags and catch the ferry to Gozo, where they would proceed to consume industrial amounts of Maltese bread with tuna and generally have a very good time without me. In the meantime, I would be back home, all alone, generally not having a very good time.

Time passes even as the shutter clicks

The second conclusion would be that the few times I was actually allowed to tag along, I would spend most of my holiday hours eating. There I am, smiling and munching my way through a burger, stealing my sister’s fries, and being a very hungry dog in a carb-lined manger.

The truth is that, until the age of 16, I always joined my family on holidays. There are only a few photos of me because I was the one battling with light, shade, angle and focus. The only time when I didn’t take the photos myself was when I was eating – then someone else would take a photo of me getting fat by the minute and laugh. Everyone would laugh. And I was happy.

Photography is a dishonest medium. Because while most photos frame a happy moment, looking at them years later is a sad struggle. Looking at my childhood photos, I realise that the people in them are older. Some of them are dead. Others I cannot even remember – childhood friends whose faces are pixellated, forgotten. If I had to meet them today, I probably wouldn’t like them. The seconds the photos capture cannot be relived. I know, it’s sentimental. And yes, time passes even as the shutter clicks. And that is the tragedy.

In his poem Reference Back, Philip Larkin writes how memories “link us to our losses”. That is what photos do – they float memories of loss to the surface.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Whoever coined that phrase must have been drunk. Because a picture is not worth a thousand words – a picture only asks questions which have no answer. I remember a photo of my mother, 16 years old and a sunrise of thick hair. She is on her own, on a roof, somewhere in a village. What is she thinking? Half a century later, she wouldn’t remember. A photo of me, 10 years old and face smudged with tears of laughter. What was I laughing about? And another photo of me opening a Christmas present. I cannot recall what the present was, but I’m sure it made me smile.

Photos are possessive. Whenever we take out our camera and shoot, it’s because we’re anxious that a beautiful moment will be lost. But despite taking a photo, that moment will still be lost. And when you find it, hiding in the nook of time, and dust it off, that moment will have expired into a sad memory.

And yet, memories of loss are better than no memories at all. Because memories, even sad ones, are a bridge to the seconds, minutes and hours we once had. We have a different hairstyle now. Our waist is thicker and time has scribbled wrinkles on our skin. And yet old photos are our history – who we were is who we are.

One day, our children and grandchildren will find an old photo of us and wonder what we were thinking. And they will be sad at how happy we were.