: 05 April 2002 :

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, since I read the entry Cerebrate did. Arha and Suds have done good versions too. Anyway, here’s mine. It's quite long, but it's not like you have anything better to do. And you can always read it a bit at a time.

Fifteen years ago, I

was five-and-a-half. The half is important when you’re that young. I was in Class 2 of primary school. I stayed behind and played the recorder one day every week. Every morning I sang hymns in assembly. I wrote in my exercise book in big, wobbly letters, and drew brightly coloured wobbly pictures of houses and trees and people.

Fifteen years ago my brother was two-and-a-half. I also had a sister, who was born on March 24th, fifteen years and ten days ago. The day she was born, my dad came at lunchtime to take me out of school so I could go and see her. She was born at home, in the room that was my parents’ room then. Now it’s my brother’s room and the room I sleep in when I’m here. I slept there last night.

My sister’s blossomed since then, and my brother. I suppose I have too.

Ten years ago, I

was ten. I was in my last year at primary school, in Mrs. Jones’ class. We went to the Forest of Dean on a residential trip that year, though I don’t remember what time of the year it was. I think it was either spring or summer, though. I do remember we had to do a project each about it, writing about all the things we’d done. The ones that stick in my mind most clearly are the canoeing day we had, which was great, and the trip to see the falcons. Symonds Yat is a place in the Forest of Dean where peregrine falcons nest in the cliffs along the river, and there’s a visitor point which sticks out from the cliffs a little way along so you can see the birds from there. I’ve not been there in the past ten years, as far as I can recall, and certainly not for a while. I can still visualise it really clearly, though.

I was going to the dentist fairly frequently, because only the year before I had smashed one of my front teeth out on a wall and it had to be replaced with an artificial cap.

Ten years ago I got on pretty well with most of the people at school. I joined in the football and the wrestling matches, although I was never much good at either. When it came to athletics or to school sports I joined in gamely (ho ho), and I was pretty good at the long jump, but my sporting prowess was never up to much. Classroom stuff was what I did best. Every Monday we would be given twenty words to learn the spellings of, and every Friday we would get a test. I almost always got 20 out of 20 without having to learn them.

Five years ago, I

was fifteen. I was in my final year at secondary school, and was revising for my GCSEs. At least, I should have been revising - I have a feeling I wasn’t working quite as hard as I could or should have been.

I had started going to gigs, little noisy, sweaty affairs in the dark skittle alley of a pub where it wasn’t hard to get a pint. Some of the bands were quite good. Some weren’t. They all came from the sixth form college or from the secondary schools in the town. This being 1997, the bands my mates were in were pretty much all indie-influenced. I’d been in a three-piece when I was twelve, playing the keyboard as one friends played the drums and another played the guitar. We split up after not very long, having failed to ever have a rehearsal where all three of us were there at the same time.

There was one band, Empty, who were given most of the support of the people I hung around with at school because two of the members had younger brothers in the same year as me. They were alright. They did a cover of Oasis’ “Rock ’n’ Roll Star” which was pretty faithful to the original. One night when I went to see them they were supporting another band who were a year or two older. Almost everyone from school turned up, watched Empty’s support set, then went home. I stayed around and watched the headliners, who were called Lungbutta. (The tickets said LUNGBUTTA, and the A was in a circle, as in ANARCHY. I can’t do it on the computer, but you get the idea.) The bassist and one of the guitarists were wearing gasmasks. The vocalist-guitarist had a Hüsker Dü t-shirt on. This much i do remember. I also remember that they made a hell of a noise, which I might have compared to Hüsker Dü if I had heard anything like that when I was thirteen. (And yeah, I know I’m supposed to be giving you a description of when I was fifteen, but nothing much really changed in those couple of years).

Well, I was impressed at the noise, and the jumping around, and it was one of those moments that remind you that there’s more to life and more to music than the trite shite you’re listening to at the moment, but these messages normally take quite some time to sink in. For the time being, I enjoyed a good bit of hardcore when I saw it live, but I was still fairly firmly entrenched in my indiedom.

That was mostly it when I was fifteen. Exams coming up at school, which I did fairly well in, and the occasional gig to lighten the tension. I did actually go and see some professional bands too, but really not that many. None of the big ones came that close to Cirencester. Gloucester was probably the closest, and that still wasn’t such a big draw.

I had enough friends, although some of them were people I have since come to realise were twats. And I quite frequently felt left out of things, and I quite often was. I spent a fair amount of time on my own, really. On the plus side, I got a lot of reading done. Throughout the next few years, as I did my A-levels, I still spent some time on my own, with a similar number of vague friends but only a few I’ve kept in touch with.

Two years ago, I

was eighteen. It was the spring of 2000, and I was in the first year of my degree. I‘d made loads of really good friends, who I still have now, and was getting settled in to Oxford life. At this exact time I would have been on holiday. I’d been seeing a girl for a couple of months, but I was amicably dumped at the beginning of March. She cited the distance as an obstacle. She was in Scotland and I was in Oxford, and I only saw her every so often. When I did, it was worth it, I thought. I liked her a lot, and still do. She was right about the distance, though, it was kind of troublesome. That and the fact that I wasn’t very good about keeping in touch with her. Never mind.

We broke up around the end of my spring term, and a couple of days later I set off on a sponsored hitchhike to Morocco through France and Spain. (In the intervening few days I shaved my head. You can interpret that how you want.) The hitchhike went OK, although it’s quite a long story, and I told it dozens of times over the Easter holidays after I got back.

The tale briefly is that the friend I was hitching with quit when we were in Spain, so I bought a phrasebook (she’s pretty much bilingual English-Spanish, but I hardly spoke a word) and got the train to Madrid and then the ferry to Tangiers. Stayed in Tangiers for five days, because by this stage I was feeling too lazy to continue my original plan of seeing the rest of the country. A couple of other friends flew out and stayed with me for a night, before going on to meet people we knew that had gone on to Marrakesh. I got fleeced a couple of times, including a MasterCard scam I only found out about when I got back to the UK. I bought a load of crap. I stayed in two different hotels, both tiny little cheap ones in the kasbah. Nothing like the big tourist places in the New Town, these were just two of the little dives that were all over the old bit of Tangiers. It was a good few days. Maybe sometime I’ll go back there.

Anyway, this time two years ago I was just sitting around having got back with quite a nice tan. Although I was on holiday I was staying in Oxford with a couple of mates that were there, all of us spending a bit of time each day working and the rest of it out on the lawns. Quite an idyllic holiday, as I recall.

One year ago, I

was nineteen. Again, I was on holiday in between terms, and getting on alright with my degree. At this point I was doing quite a bit of student drama, mainly technical stuff, having a good time and messing about. I wasn’t working incredibly hard.

At this precise point a year ago, the night of the 4th of April, I was watching Tortoise on stage at Camber Sands, and they were amazing. I was there for All Tomorrow’s Parties, which Tortoise were curating, with five other people in a chalet. One of these people was a beautiful girl who I’d met about five months before and started going out with. She’d met a girl called Katie in the record shop she worked in, and Katie bought one of the other tickets. I sold another three to a bloke called Simon who I got in touch with over the internet, who stayed with us in the chalet with his mate and his girlfriend. All of them were great people, and the weekend was fantastic - brilliant music including Tortoise, Calexico, Lambchop, Boards of Canada, Atmosphere, Broadcast, Autechre and Yo La Tengo (and those are just the highlights). The really nice site and the comfort and camaraderie of having the chalet went towards making it one of the best things I’ve ever done. I can’t go this year, but there’s no way I’m missing the one this time in 2003.

Reading back over this bit, I can't help feeling I haven't done justice to just how good a weekend it was. Maybe there's no way I can. Suffice it to say that I'm still with the girl, for which I'm very thankful, and we frequently reminisce about how good the music was, and the indie-kids building sandcastles on the beach, and kissing on the swings. So many beautiful memories.