BY an odd coincidence various members of my family have been turning up recently in the Examiner in sepia-style pictures from a distant past.

This has turned me a bit paranoid. As the fellow in charge of a significant part of the Examiner’s weekly output of nostalgia I’ve started inspecting pictures of trolleybuses, old Huddersfield streets and classroom line-ups prior to publication with a magnifying glass to see if mum, dad, brother Anthony or various cousins, nephews, aunts and uncles have sneaked into what was, until fairly recently, a private past.

You can’t be photographed retrospectively while young, I keep telling myself. Besides, you’re so old nobody will have a colour picture of you when your hair was a shock of ginger and you were as thin as a peeled stick.

But, of course, these days you can do just about anything you want with pictures.

I suppose if I wanted to I could find a monochrome picture of myself and use some of that new colouring software to recreate a carrot-top over which to be spectacularly embarrassed.

Perhaps add a tank top with a TV interference pattern. The mind boggles.

I could photoshop myself into pictures of the Shambles or riding on a 1920s tram through Deighton.

I could be shaking hands with Derek Ibbotson or giving Anita Lonsbrough a cheeky hug.

Or better still, I could paste myself into a shot beating either or both of them to the finishing line. As long as I remember which one was the runner and which one was the swimmer.

If I ever become famous – a likelihood that is receding with the speed of a runaway train – someone with more skill than myself could get rid of the bags under my eyes, the hairs in my ears and my beer-fancier’s midriff and present me on the cover of an album or Hello magazine with a body uncannily similar to that of Brad Pitt.

Before my brother was born mum and dad took me, aged about four, along to Greaves photographers for a family portrait. We were painstakingly arranged to create a balanced composition of which Mr da Vinci would have been proud.

I got cross and bored and wouldn’t let go of a friction-motor car. That car is still in the picture.

About a decade ago my mother started undotting her ‘I’s and uncrossing her ‘T’s. She couldn’t understand why my brother wasn’t in the picture.

So I took the original along to a photographers with a monochrome shot of Anthony aged perhaps 18 months and the photographer ‘doctored’ him into the shot, sitting on mum’s lap. She was well chuffed.

It’s perhaps partly because photos can no longer be trusted to tell the truth that we have become less enamoured of them.

But I think it’s much more to do with the fact that they have been devalued. Before digital, cameras were bulky and slow. They had to be loaded with film. If you cared about what you took, you’d deliberate for ages about composition, light settings, focal lengths and suchlike.

Now it’s just point and press. Most cameras hold hundreds if not thousands of images. They cost nothing to shoot so you may as well shoot dozens. Or why not switch to video? Anything you don’t like can be erased instantly.

Five patient camels would stagger under the weight of photo albums that wife Pip has accumulated over the years. These have been carefully labelled by year and subject.

They are inspected irregularly, but probably once a year, usually with the annual dusting.

I’m getting a thick ear from Pip because I’m not keeping up the tradition. I take most of our pictures now and they get downloaded to computer where I tinker with them briefly before burning them to a disk.

“Where are our pictures of Wales, Sandra’s wedding, Alfie gurning through a toilet seat, Uncle Sam stuck in the brambles?”

“On disk.”

“Can you undisk them and print them up?”

“Yes.”

“Will you?”

“No.”

And that’s the way it is these days. We have the pictures – and I know exactly where to find them – but we don’t have them to hand.

With a few exceptions we can’t pick up and flick through those embarrassing, red-eyed, half-cut shots of people at parties whose surnames you’ve now forgotten or the series of blurred pictures of sunsets on Zakynthos or was it Rhodes, grandpa with his nose in a mince pie or Auntie Edith trying to kiss cousin Dennis.

All these people, places and memories are streams of dormant electrons, sleeping like Arthur and his knights, awaiting the call.

And I can tell you, Pip’s not best pleased. In fact, somewhere I have a photo of her not being best pleased. Let me have a quick look for it …

Just a quick postscript. I happen to be typing this in the kitchen. I wondered how many photographs we have on display in this one room. It’s 73.

That’s not counting the framed Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover. Do you remember which Beatle is crossing Abbey Road barefoot?