It should have been a straightforward sale.
At some point in the story, this guitar stopped being mine. I sold it and somebody else bought it. Ordinarily that would have been the end of our association: guitar gone, money received, move on.
Except music has a habit of interfering with tidy conclusions.
“I got an ITV Telethon gig invite and asked if I could borrow it back.”
I needed the guitar again.
An invitation arrived to play an ITV Telethon gig. There was just one slight complication: the guitar I wanted was no longer mine.
So I did the obvious — or possibly rather cheeky — thing. I called the woman who had bought it and asked whether I could borrow my old guitar back.
She said yes.
And that is how I met my wife.
One borrowed guitar became considerably more than a gig.
The woman at the other end of that telephone call became my wife. We had a son, Sam — Amruze, who grew up surrounded by music and technology.
There is a photograph of him as a child staring intently at a television. Years later, that little coincidence acquired a pleasing extra meaning: he went on to work for a number of years as a videographer for a television channel.
Music remained part of the story too. Under the names Amruze and Lemon Fresh, he made music of his own and later remixed Honey Tree.
None of that is visible if this is simply catalogued as “photograph of Paul with guitar”. That is why this section of the site exists.
A guitar is just an object.
Until it isn't.
Old photographs are useful because they show us what something looked like. Their real value often begins when somebody remembers what happened just outside the frame.
