Magazine-perfect photographs are mission impossible

FOR anyone reading this who would rather eat their neighbour’s toenail clippings than read a column about Instagram, give it two more sentences.

Firstly, the following is not really about the social media website — more a pondering of what it says about us. Secondly, if you don’t know what it is, in summary, it is a website where you can upload pictures to show people. Simples. Hands up, I have an Instagram account. I’m not very good at it — I’m more comfortable with Twitter where users post links to news stories, anecdotes, jokes, opinions and other snippets in words. TV presenter Claudia Winkleman put it well recently when she said Instagram is for show-offs and is bizarre because so many users want to incite envy. For instance, people with a huge following post pictures of homemade food that look like works of art — others of their achingly stylish homes, shots of them mid-air doing a ski jump in designer coats or their kids simultaneously doing handstands on beautiful beaches. But here’s the thing. Their lives can be nothing like the perfection they want to portray because, having tried to take a picture where my family are all vaguely looking at the camera with clean faces (and failed), I know it’s not easy and in fact takes about three weeks to get a magazine-perfect shot. So their carefree “here’s a photo that just fell on to my camera” images are actually the results of lives put on hold because the humans attached to them are so insecure they need you to believe their existence is amazing.

But occasionally — and I can only apologise — I still give it a go, like on Sunday on a family trip to Blair Drummond Safari Park. Usually I post work-related stuff but sometimes a mother’s heart bursts with pride and I felt compelled to share a picture of the “three wee mites” asleep in the back of the car as we made the 40-minute drive, exhausted by a morning of buildup. And that’s the last Instagram picture of the day, for any other would have shown the “mites” caked in mud, in a state of snotters for tears, fighting over seeing more animals, or on a bouncy castle.

And of me, you’d have seen the truth — a frazzled mum-of-three who had some of Chester’s snot on her anorak, whose mascara was smudged half-way down her cheeks and who needed a coffee or something stronger.

So, there you have it. For every glamorous mum who’s lost the baby weight after six weeks on a beach in Barbados, there’s a me keeping it real with a muffin top, dreaming of sleep — and gin.

Oh, and the safari park was awesome.

A not-for-Instagram snap taken during the trip to blair Drummond.