I was walking my dog down the street the other day when I came upon an inscription chalked on the path. It was a big series of circles with the words “Always smile even when the sun dosen’t (sic) shine.” This irked me no end. I was in a perfectly serviceable, neutral mood and was now being told by some chalky child with bad spelling that I had to put on a fake smile on a cloudy day. Why would I do such a thing? For whose benefit? It was meant to be a positive affirmation but sent me into a teacup-sized storm of indignation. I don’t like anonymous messages telling me to smile.

Photo © Jacqueline Munguía/Unsplash

My 92-year-old mother refuses to smile in photos. I think she gave it up somewhere in the early 2000s. She just doesn’t believe in putting on a show for a photo, even though she smiles quite happily in real life. Photos of her remind me of old daguerreotypes of 1850s families – severe, with not the merest hint of a snicker. Photographers in those days didn’t ask people to say ‘cheese’, they requested ‘prune’, which seems much...