I have been avoiding the internet in general for a few days. I got an impulse to scan my photographs. I first got a camera of my own in 1984 (although I had used parental etc camera intermittently before that, of course). I got a digital camera in 2001, so I have 17 years of actual photographs sitting in photo albums taking up shelfspace and never really looked at. I initially thought I would scan a few just to publish here, but then I thought I might as well do the lot and capitalise on the space saving. I am so far up to July 1989 ie when I left University. Additionally photos up to 1994 have been removed from their albums. I decided to avoid the internet for several reasons, including not being distracted and not putting too much of a burden on the inadequate memory of my PC. I sat in front of the TV and transferred several videos to DVD.
It was quite a strange experience going through highlights of ten years of my life. Photos of places. I have quite a few of homes and workplaces etc, but there does seem to be a lack of photos of other places that were a regular feature of my life. Eg plenty on restaurants but only three or four pubs. Most stiking are the pictures of people. Especially University. It wasn't so bad when I was in a shared house but I found the pictures of life in Hall of Residence to be depressing.
What a strange experience. I arrived at University straight from school. I had wanted to take a year out, but my parents - who had both done so - opposed it. It wasn't really the done thing. When I returned to my old school a 'careers' teacher explained that they discouraged it because employers are less likely to take on older people...yes, perhaps once a new graduate gets past 25 or certainly 30 but not, like, 22, especially when so many people do 4 year degree courses and mine was 3. I was immature and unworldly- wise, with little experience outside a narrow geographical and social world.
I was left with an underlying feeling of trying desperately to fit in with people whom I didn't actually want to fit in with. The pressure of The Group. Obviously, the comments below don't say anything about the basic decency of individuals, their merits, their strengths in adversity, their compassion, their private selves. But as far as The Crowd was concerned, there was so much jostling to be supreme. The obnoxious, the insecure, the attention-seekers, the arrogant and the immature all striving to be the coolest and at the heart of the 'in-crowd'.
Briefly I wondered what they are like now. In many cases it's not difficult to find out their career, their marital/parental status etc, but no real sense of who they are. Are those that seemed mature now ossified and grumpy? Are the 'trendy', now yummy-mummies with Chelsea Tractors? The immature and lost now quietly getting on with lives of quiet fulfilment? Or desperation?
But then I realise I don't care. A Hall of Residence is a weird community, where strangers are thrust together to spend their lives in quite intimate proximity. I didn't fit in. I was at the wrong University, doing a piss-poor course surrounded by people I wouldn't previously or subsequently have chosen as friends. I never do regrets, no speculation of what might have been, the roads not taken. I tend to think that life is what happens while one is busy making other plans.
Maybe if I had gone to a different university I might have chosen a different career path and my personal life would have unfolded differently. And it's impossible to determine whether that would have been better, or frighteningly disastrous.
I did have this idea that twenty years on, many of my contemporaries would be famous. A small number are slightly in the public eye but I realise now that my University was never designed to create Masters/Mistresses of the Universe, but to provide the solid professional backbone of Middle England (or Malaysia or America or whatever).
Some of the photos will, inevitably, end up on this blog in the fullness of time.
