Twenty Years On

I recently found myself thinking about an anniversary. Late September marked both my release from quarantine and the 20th anniversary of my joining Loughborough University. It came to mind, largely because of this picture, retrieved from my box of important crap, which has been stored in my room back in the UK ever since I quit those shores some nine years ago. I also found my IAM membership badge, but that’s another story.

Anyway, this rather magnificent piece was created by my good friend, Tom. The quality of the image ain’t great, simply because he made the drawing on a computer screen and I photographed the same with a primitive digital camera I’d borrowed from the lab. It was a Sony, I think, but the notable point was that the images were saved to a 3.5″ floppy drive.* None of your 64gb flash drives back then, dontchaknow? At least, nothing even close was available to poor students, so we made do with what we could get. I managed to print the image, then stuck it in a box where it remained folded and crumpled. No matter; it remains one of my favourite images.

Tom and I are some 20 years or so apart, but we soon bonded over a love of music. More specifically, as I recall, I introduced him to The Smiths and he, in turn, put me in touch with Pavement. I never could decide who got the best out of that exchange, but in view of recent issues concerning one SP Morrissey, I think it was probably yours truly. Indeed, I am still discovering Pavement tracks, thanks to the wonders of the Internet and Spotify.

Nothing really matters. This is the point. The longer I live, the more this makes sense. I just looked up the definition of nihilism, and while I have never considered myself nihilistic – yes, I reject religion, but I have quite clear moral principals – I am coming to the rather inevitable conclusion that young Tom was pretty much bang on the money. Bearing in mind he was perhaps only 20 years old at the time, and could barely recall the correct order of the twelve months of the calendar (I kid you not), I think it was rather profound. I must have thought so at the time, too. Why else would I have bothered to capture the image?

It seems to me now, as I wallow in my late fifties, (still) struggling to make sense of life in a strange land, struggling the best I can to raise and nurture two delightful children, struggling to make myself understood, struggling to persuade those close to me that I need help, struggling to stop sweating my arse off for 8 months each year, struggling to stay alive on the roads while those all around me could not care less, and struggling to find the conclusion to this point, that nothing really matters. On about the most serious level I can think of, should one of my children go on to find the cure for cancer, it still would not actually matter. Would it? In the end, there is only the end.

The end.

*Edit: couldn’t resist checking with Messsssrs Goooooogle. Here you go: