The photo on my office wall

I was working in one of those offices where everyone has photos of their family on their desk. Those without family have pictures of pets.  

My wall is blank, pictureless, attracting the glimpses and stares of the disapproving for being so. I am single, petless.  

And then a book arrives. A second hand translation of a Jules Verne novel (a Bison Frontiers of Imagination translation). Inside, is a photo, one used as a makeshift bookmark and left there. A black and white, as-if-from-the-70s photo of a woman and two men, all in their late twenties/early thirties, the bearded man is straddling a cat across his shoulder.  He looks a bit like Geraint from university, but it isn’t Geraint, it isn’t anyone I know, it’s an American-published book so assumedly the people in the photo (and their cat) are all American.  

I have my office-wall photo.   

The photo has been on my office space for twenty plus years now, across numerous jobs.  I’m married now, I could put up a picture of Mrs Oblong, but I don’t.  The picture of the three complete strangers and the cat have become a part of who I am.