Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
I want to talk about a photograph that's actually pinned above my desk, so I look at it more often than any other picture I own. It's of my grandfather in his vegetable garden, crouching down between rows of tomato plants with this half-amused expression, as if he'd just noticed the camera a second too late. My mother took it — she'd borrowed my dad's old camera for the weekend, mostly to photograph flowers, and this one was almost an accident, a shot she took while he was talking to her rather than posing. It was taken maybe fifteen years ago, back when I was still at secondary school and used to spend most of my summer holidays at my grandparents' house in the countryside. What I like about it isn't really the composition, which is a bit off-centre if I'm honest, but what it captures — that particular version of him, sunburnt, unbothered, completely in his element. He passed away a few years later, and it's strange how a photograph you barely noticed at the time becomes the one you'd grab first if the house were on fire. Whenever I'm having a stressful week, I find myself glancing up at it, and there's something oddly steadying about it — not nostalgia exactly, more a reminder that he was a genuinely content person, and that contentment like that is possible. It's not a technically good photo at all, but it's the one I'd keep.