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There was an artist called Jamie Livingstone who took a Polaroid photo every day for 18 years, right up until the day he died of cancer in October 1997. The whole collection has been put online here.

I’ve been taking a lot of Polaroid photos recently. After playing around with digital photos and videos for the blog there’s something refreshing about reverting to a Polaroid camera – the machine makes a big loud noise and no matter how I light the room or where I point the camera, the image is always decentred and blurry. I think it’s broken, in fact. Polaroid photos capture moments in a white square frame with alarming finality. Now that we can take digital photos, assess them, delete them, retake them, enhance them, it’s a novelty to take a photo that is instant but at the same time such a commitment – you have to accept the version of the image that comes out. Maybe that just means they’re a bit crap, but I like them.

This photo captures the moment when the wind blew a strange reedy web of fibres from my window box into my slippers on the floor of my bedroom one evening. It scared me stupid for about 3 minutes until I realised it was, after all, just a bit of grass.

And that made me think about slippers. Slippers are safe shoes, they never go outside, they are meant to be warm and clean and comforting. It’s terribly disconcerting to find something potentially life-threatening lurking in one’s slipper. When I was young I always thought that if I were ever to live in Australia, I must remember to always check my shoes for scorpions and spiders before putting them on.

But I think Polaroid photos are beautiful. I only had one film and here’s some other examples of what I took, and I remember every moment now that they’ve been squared off in a white frame:

• View of an Italian machine-bit mould and a hand made book from above, on the table cloth with an embroidered flower

• Empty glass of water with slice of lemon in the bottom, under the desk lamp. It came out looking like a hot whisky.

• An oatcake resting on a pillow on the bed, broken in two after my friend lay on it without noticing that it was there (I thought it was a good idea, she often gets hungry in the night)

• Wasp resting on the corner of a book (this one didn’t turn out)

• A collection of important things, which included a silver cigarette case, a wooden bowl from Africa with hair grips and a shell in it, a pebble that is very smooth, and the pelvic bone of a dead bird

• The view of the back of my desk while I was studying for exams

So just as I’m getting into my Polaroids, it’s been annoying  to discover that Polaroid are going to cease manufacturing their films, lamented here in an articlce called Requiem for a Polaroid. It makes everything about them more precious, and the value of their unpredictability is even more pronounced now they’re going to stop making them - you can’t waste a single photo….