"So if you just press that button there, you can scroll through the party pictures." I handed my mum my camera and walked towards the kitchen.
A few minutes later I returned laden with a fresh pot of tea.
"What are you looking at?" I asked, seeing her still scrolling through the pictures.
"Oh, nothing in particular" she replied.
I leaned over the table to look at the digital screen, expecting to see the shots I had taken of my family earlier that day. Instead, to my horror, were photographs of my trip to New York, from March of this year. In an instant I realised that she must have viewed all the other pictures which I had left on the camera; she would have seen me oiled up, my breasts bursting out of a tight rubber dress and my wearing 6-inch stilettos on my feet. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach.
I grabbed the camera from her hands and switched it off. "Did you look through them all?!" I squeaked.
She nodded. "Yes."
"So you saw... everything?"
She blushed. "Um, yes."
"All my saucy pics?"
"Yes."
Inwardly I screamed, loudly. Outwardly I gritted my teeth and went into 'damage-limitation' mode. "Well, they weren't for your eyes. I said to look at the pictures of the party: the other photos are private. You shouldn't have looked at them."
"Sorry" she said, quietly.
"Let's not discuss this again."
"Best not to" she agreed.
We drank our tea in silence and shortly afterwards I made my way home. It was only when I looked through the camera later, that I realised that even though I was embarrassed by her finding those pictures, I had got off lightly: also stored on the memory card were other, more compromising photographs, specifically the ones I snapped of various erect penises from my trip to the Museum of Sex. It's one thing to have your mum see you dressed up in sexy gear, but it's another thing entirely for her to view the material you use to masturbate with. Ugh.
Suffice it to say all these photographs have now been deleted from my camera. (But not before being uploaded (and backed up) onto my computer first, that is.)