Now I doubt everything

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The second thing that made me question everything I see occurred last week. I recently joined an agency that hires out events staff. I saw an advert and thought ‘I can do that’ – what with all my volunteering at the theatre, the cinema, at ceilidhs and dinners and even as Santa’s elf, I have plenty of experience and it would be a bonus if I could do the same sort of thing and get paid for it! So I signed up. A job last week asked for people to model for an outdoor photo shoot. Well I have trainers and walking boots so I thought I could do that. A group of us were sent along to an advertising agency to do some promotional photos for a charity advertising its fund-raising events. Now I’ve often seen promotional posters and adverts in magazines etc. for sponsored walks, fun runs, places in the London marathon and all that sort of thing, and I just assumed that the photos accompanying them, of smiling people taking part, were the people actually taking part on previous occasions. Now I know better! The charity in question had a couple of events planned, one in May and the other in October. So although it was freezing and the trees were all bare of leaves, we put on branded T-shirts and pretended we were on a fun walk or run on a sunny May day (the photographer had to work pretty quickly before we all turned purple!) After walking and running up and down a village green a few times in groups of two or three or four, we moved to a woodland location and pretended we were out for a fund-raising walk in October. Then we moved to a country lane where we pretended to be runners. We would jog literally about 3 metres, then do it again in different combinations. Of course if the photographer wanted shots from the front, he had to run backwards in front of us which was tricky, so after a few tries he asked us to just walk or run on the spot instead. We had to just shift from foot to foot and move our arms in a realistic sort of way while chatting and looking like we were having a brilliant time (that at least was genuine, because we were laughing so much our faces hurt!) The whole experience was hilarious, but it has made me question everything. It seems that everything I thought was genuine is actually fake! I can’t believe anything any more! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2023.