I took most of the day off today, but still managed to get more constructive work done than I did yesterday when I was at it all day.
Had a mini barbecue at lunchtime on a £2.99 disposal set, which was surprisingly efficient. I rested it on top of my proper barbecue, which cost about £80 and which I used once, on
my birthday in 2003 (look how pathetically short the entry is - but then, I would have been pretty hungover) but which in the last six years has sat in my garden quietly rusting (there was a cover on it for a long time, but it had a gap in it and the damage was done). Nice to get a second use out of the thing, even if it was just as a convenient right-height work surface to use the cheap BBQ.
I often forget to take time out, or go out in the sunshine and it was relling (the cooler form of chillaxing) to be having some sausages and a beer with a couple of my nearest and dearest.
Then in the afternoon my girlfriend and me headed over to Oxford and had a walk around the city. Me moaning about how much time had passed and how old I was and her moaning about how I am always going on about how old I am and how I will regret that when I am really old.
But it is always a bitter sweet experience to be back at the haunts of my youth, and to think about what a young idiot I was (though also sweet to remember all the fun stuff we got up to). I realised with a start that within a month it will be the 20th anniversary of my Finals. That was a mind fuck. It was bad enough realising when I was 36 that it was half a lifetime since I left school, but now at 41 it's over half a lifetime since I left University.
Some of my memories of Oxford are so clear and fresh that I begin to understand why really old people get confused about chronology and start to believe that their youth was just yesterday. Because coming out of my final Finals exam and being greeted by cheeky Emma Kennedy, who foolishly gave me a bottle of whisky, rather than the cliched champagne, could easily have happened last week, so clear in my head is it. I drank three quarters of the bottle of whisky in the next two and a half hours, as well as much champagne and then was sick all over the floor of Keble college gents toilet. For comfort I sat on the toilet as I puked copiously on the floor, my mind too addled to realise it might be more efficient if I went on the floor and spewed into the toilet. How that little genius ended up with a 2:1 I will never know.
I was intent on going for a curry and more booze despite this, but some unseen hand guided me home instead, a little voice in my head changing my course and probably saving my life.
I was in bed by 8pm that night and think I was probably lucky to wake up still alive the next morning. It was the closest Kennedy has come to killing me yet. I am sure she will succeed one of these days.
I kept a diary through the misery of my final term at University and looking at it I wish I had kept one through the whole three years. Indeed, writing my book I have realised the value both of Warming Up (which has documented many relevant incidents that I would surely have forgotten even from two years ago) and a personal diary that I luckily kept through the worst of my depravity as I turned 40. I could probably live for the rest of my life writing books and shows based on my various diaries if I had only kept them religiously. But I just checked out the entry for May 3rd 1989 and it's full of cracking stuff that I remember nothing about. I was terrified about my upcoming exams which I seemed doomed to fail, getting drunk and chasing girls. My teenage rebellion coming a bit late at nearly 22. The fear and sadness and hormonal confusions are palpable. It's not all that different than the book I am writing at the moment. Thank God I have always been such a dick - it's going to keep me afloat through these uncertain financial times.
We went to look around St Catz, my old college, and what was more of a mind fuck than realising how long ago it was that I studied here was realising that it is actually five years since I last visited here,
with a film crew for the Other Boat Race. That really seems like yesterday, but it's half a decade ago. I am going to try to never blink again, because I am convinced the next time I do that I will wake up and it'll be 2057 and I'll be on my deathbed.
Damn I blinked.
And I'm on my deathbed and it's 2010.
Ah well I had a good knock.
In the last five years a whole new section of buildings has shot up in the college. It was pretty freaky.
I went and had a look through the windows of the JCR bar, but I didn't go in. I didn't really like it much there and got bullied a bit by the Bar Studs who hung around there the whole time, never venturing out of their own college like the parochial, chip on their shoulder, rugby playing dicks they were. Don't worry. I am over it.
If someone who had graduated in 1969 had come to visit the college when I was there I would have felt like they had come from another era. Yet here I was, a figure from history. A ghost walking through the places a younger man once walked with tears in his eyes.
But I didn't feel like the ghost - but I suppose ghosts don't feel that, not if Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense is to be believed. I felt I sensed the ghost of the 21 year old me as I walked down certain roads and alleyways. If only I could see him properly and tell him to stop being such a dick. Or to be a bit more a dick to make my stories about him better.
Twenty years ago my heart was being toyed with by a pretty first year who was flirting with me and touching me and kissing me, but who had no intention of taking things any further. I don't remember much about it now, but it's in my diary. She let me sleep on her floor that night. Oh lucky me.
I would definitely tell the younger me to walk away from that one. Even as I read it I can tell there was no way she was after anything more than the attention and the pleasure of wrapping me round her little finger. Fair play to her, why not? If I was a pretty 19 year old girl I'd be all over that.
But that young man is so scared of going into a big exam unprepared for the first time in his life and so convinced (reasonably so) that he is going to fail, that probably the nicest thing I could do is just to tell him he'll come out of it OK and that in fact he will never have any use or the qualification anyway and will (at least for the next 20 years) not even bother to go and pick it up. Making me a graduand, rather than a graduate.
Maybe I should go and graduate soon.
I had always planned to do it alongside my son or daughter as he or she picked up their degree. But there's a long time to wait for that one.
The streets were full of students who all too soon will be looking back with melancholy nostalgia at May 3rd 2009. The world keeps on turning and time keeps on passing.
That's pretty much all I remember from what I learned about history here.
