I don't think I would go back to being 16 again for all the Marmite in Hampshire. All at once you're having to cope for the first time with all sorts of feeling and insecurities, falling in and out of love, making and breaking friends, coping with bitchiness and backstabbing, having to find the balance between rebelling against the authority of your parents and your teachers without getting sent to prison, whilst trying to work for exams that everyone tells you will affect your whole life.
I ploughed my way through the diary I kept during the sixth form this afternoon and it's mainly depressing reading. A good eighty per cent of my musings are about my first girlfriend and her reluctance to engage at all in the physical side of our relationship (which tragically for the teenage me meant she wasn't even interested in snogging me, let alone whatever other disgusting thoughts are racing through your minds) and my consequent attempts to persuade her through nagging and light coercion into relenting. It goes on for months and months. It is exhausting reading about it, so God knows what Hell it was to live through. We broke up and made up an average of about six times a week for the entire two years of our relationship. "It surely must be over soon unless things change" I seem to be constantly writing and yet still it drags on. The only times I suddenly seem positive about our love is when some small token of sexual affection has been meted out. I am so transparently shallow that the 40 year old me can only laugh. And wonder if he will be as clearly transparently shallow to his 60 year old self.
There were times this afternoon when I wished I could travel back in time, grab the young me by the scruff of the neck, shake him vigorously and tell him to just finish it for Christ's sake. And yet, there's also a part of me that admires this silly young man for staying by his girl, even if she (possibly correctly) thinks he's mainly after one thing. Clearly there was something more to my feelings for her, because it would have been easy to finish it and find a girl who might let me go a little bit further. I did really like her and believed back then that I would just have one girlfriend my entire life (my parents' ludicrously happy marriage after meeting when they were 13 being an unhealthy and unrealistic influence on my life!) and I wanted it to be her.
I have lots of happy memories from that time and there is still a lot of warmth in my heart for my first love, but to read my diary you'd think I was going through a living Hell. Whilst all my friends were riding the love train to Sexville (so they claimed), I was stuck at the station with a girl who was reluctant to even hug me. In hindsight it's easy to say I should have been more patient and cooler about the whole thing, but my body was swarming with hormones, my mind clouded with confusion and I was absolutely convinced I was going to die young, as an unloved virgin.
Yet I was terrified of sex as I was of death and of practically everything and terrifically immature and I am pretty sure that this whole situation suited me. If I had been with a more willing partner then I would have had to actually do something about it, which would surely have been worse than getting nothing at all.
Things got better and slightly hotter as the years went by and she is a very important person in my life and I am still very fond of her - we went through a lot together, if not the kind of things that the 17 year old diary writing me seemed primarily interested in. With the benefit of hindsight I can see her side of the story a lot more clearly now, but also appreciate that I was rather sweet about it too. And I am glad we stayed together, even though it's patently clear that it wasn't going to work. Though it would be interesting to see how life had panned out if one of those break ups had not been followed by a make up.
As things got better and my life got slightly less frustrating the diary entries dry up a bit. I wrote on the 7th November 1984, then not again until the 26th December, then there is a final entry on 17th March 1985 which I start with, "I've really got to keep this diary going."
But life was beginning and things were going on, which I would love to be able to read about now, but which I was too busy doing at the time to bother with recording. I managed to start again with a new diary in July of that year, which I kept intermittently through my year off.
But this final school diary ends with about 50 blank pages at the end and the final comment "On the verge of a police state - more of that tomorrow."
But there is nothing over the page. So anyone who chances across this diary in the future might think that the fascists discovered that I was about to reveal the truth and had me snuffed out before I let the world (well my diary that no one else read) what was
really going on.
