I picked Barney up from school, and we took one of his little pals home with us for playtime and tea. It being a lovely sunny day, we stopped off at the park for a bit of a runabout. The boys head off and do their running about, and I’m left on the bench wondering how to occupy myself. I spend a little while observing insects in the grass but this activity is rapidly exhausted. If only I had a camera with me, I think.

Ah, but wait - I do! There’s the crappy one that’s inside my phone. Let’s play with that. So I haul it out of my pocket and start fiddling around. And to my astonishment, find some features that I had no idea were there, like a rudimentary white balance setting, effects like negatives and sepia shots, and most surprising of all: a half-decent panorama mode. It does a pretty good job of stitching three images together into a pleasing wide-angle effect. I take three or four panoramic pics of the playground but this, like the insect-watching, can’t last for long.

Oh. Hang on. What happens if we start messing with panorama mode, and deliberately don’t shoot contiguous images?

And that’s how I occupied myself for 40 minutes while the kids ran themselves to exhaustion. Parenting: it’s all about making the most of every situation.