Table talk

A modern Mexican menu serves up a few surprises

Michael Deacon at Ella Canta in London

ONE THING I’LL FIND hard to explain to my son when he’s older: photograph albums. ‘Y’see, lad,’ I’ll have to tell him, for some reason in the voice of an elderly Yorkshireman, ‘when I were your age, people hardly ever took photographs. Birthdays, Christmas, holidays, visits from your grandparents. That was pretty much it.

‘And even when you did take a photo, you couldn’t look at it straight away, to check how it looked. First, you had to wait till you’d used up this thing called “the film”, which might take months. And then, when “the film” was finally finished, you’d have to go to a branch of Boots to get it “developed”, which would take weeks. And then, after all that time, the lady at Boots would hand over your photos – and you’d find that every single one seemed to be a selfie by an enormous earthworm. And then you’d realise that you’d had your finger over the lens, and all the pictures were completely ruined.

‘Sometimes, though, as many as half the pictures would come out all right. In which case, you’d place them delicately in a big, serious-looking book called a “photograph album”, carefully stow it away in a drawer, and then never look at it again.’

To my son, this will be baffling. But in my lifetime alone, our relationship with photography has changed utterly. In 1980, the year I was born, an estimated total of 25 billion photos were taken. That averages out at around five photos a year for everyone on earth at