Weekly Photo Challenge: (Boundaries)

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NEW!  Weekly Photo Challenge: Each week, we’ll provide a theme for creative inspiration. You take photographs based on your interpretation of the theme, and post them on your blog.  To make it easy for others to check out your photos, title your blog post “Weekly Photo Challenge: (theme of the week)”.  This week’s theme is: Boundaries.

I was so tempted to title this blog exactly as instructed, but I wasn’t sure people would get the joke.

I’m no photographer, especially as cameras are pretty technical these days.  The first time I had a mobile phone with a camera, I tried to look through the lens part on the back to take a picture but couldn’t see anything and thought it was broken.

To take part in this new challenge, then, I will trawl the Hub’s catalogue for a photo that matches the theme and blog about it.

See these boys?  They are bound by their circumstances – you’d think: they can’t remember their parents working; they live on benefits on a council estate.  According to the Daily Mail they should be standing on street corners, doing drugs and petty crime and hating the world.

They don’t. 

One is at university; the other on a full scholarship at a private school and heading for university.  They are polite to their parents and help old ladies with their shopping.  Tory Boy has had some sort of job from the age of thirteen: he spent every summer filling in for the holidaying local paper boys and girls, earning a fortune.   He has been a language ambassador, a safe contact for bullied children, deputy head boy, college president.  He wrote and read the eulogy at the funeral of a dear friend.  He helped an MP get elected and this summer he interned in the Houses of Parliament.

Spud is a popular member of his class and even with his teachers.  He has ten-hour days and takes two buses to school and two back.  He was elected to his student council but didn’t stand for re-election because politics is all about ‘talking and talking and nothing gets done.’  He knows his own mind.

Motherly pride aside, my point is that the only boundaries we have are those we allow to grow up around us.  I don’t care what jobs my boys do, so long as they do it to their best of their ability.  Life is what you make it and anyone can rise above their circumstances if they determined enough.  History is littered with people who did just that.  There are no boundaries: only self-imposed limits.