Last Thursday was my 32nd wedding anniversary, and as my wife just happened to be celebrating on the same day, we decided to share a fry-up and a couple of glasses of Sambuca. That’s romance!

Then it was time to get out that old photograph album for a trip down memory lane about the big day in 1987.

On average, it comes out about once every 10 years.

However, it wasn’t our own wedding album that we blew the dust off, but a book called One Day For Life.

There is a good chance you have a copy of it too, somewhere at home, because it was the number one bestseller that Christmas, even outselling The Guinness Book of Records, which must have been some kind of record.

The book was the culmination of the world’s biggest photographic competition and raised over £1 million for a cancer charity, with the judges choosing the best 350 to go in the book, all supported by Fergie, Duchess of York (I wonder what happened to her).

The challenge was to take a picture portraying everyday life in Britain, with the stipulation that it had to be taken on one particular day: Friday, August 14, 1987.

Of all days to pick, that was the eve of our wedding.

More to the point: it was the day after my stag night, which began at the Clifton Hotel and ended somewhere else in Swindon, though I have absolutely no recollection of where, precisely.

For this reason, I never did get round to being one of the 55,000 people who entered the competition, because although I was quite a keen photographer at the time, on that particular day all my energy was focused on somehow getting my head off the pillow, and then catching up on all the things I was expected to do to prepare for the wedding, the next day.

In those days, if you fancied yourself as a photographer, you needed big muscles and a lot of energy to carry around a big camera and a few lenses in a big bag, with a tripod on your back.

These days, of course, everything you need fits in your pocket, and if you want it to, your ‘camera’ will also remind you when it’s your anniversary and help you phone your wife.

So the thing about all the photos in the book is not how much their subject matter has changed, but rather that they were all taken on film.

Indeed, despite the passage of 32 years, it’s surprising how many of the photographs – most of them, actually – look like they could have been taken yesterday.

That’s because the majority are landscapes or portraits of people, both of which are pretty timeless, and even the fashions don’t seem so far removed from today’s, apart from those worn by old people. Old people looked older in 1987, compared with their counterparts today.

Actually, the most old-fashioned things in the whole book are the bikes. From the comparatively low-tech racing bikes to the postman’s, propped up outside a cottage, they all look like they should be in a museum.

As you would expect, the cars look dated too, and several pictures show people doing things they just don’t do anymore, most notably: using phone boxes.

Swindon somehow managed to be completely absent from the book, which is especially sad because One Day For Life took place a hundred years, to the very day, since the death of celebrated local writer, Richard Jefferies.

The centenary of the death of one Swindon writer and the final day of freedom for another… and yet neither of them made it into the book.

Incredible.