Unpopular


Monday, October 15, 2001
Rosebud

I did something pretty sad at the weekend. I went to www.friendsreunited.co.uk and checked out my old school. For those of you unfamiliar with the site, it’s basically a database into which ex-students from UK schools leave a short description about what they are up to now, allowing, I guess, old school mates to get in touch with people they lost contact with years ago. I don’t know why I went to the site other than through idle, or perhaps morbid curiosity, but it was strangely compelling if only to see the small numbers of people actually listed, and for the apparent banal normality of their lives. Not that I want to be critical, because god knows my life is hardly exciting and exceptional, but I dunno, I just find it quite depressing that people define themselves by how many kids they do or don’t have.

Whatever. I only recognised maybe one name from my year group, and that was someone who would have laughed at me for being, um, a ‘geek’ if such definitions existed in Scottish schools in the early 1980s, as I talked about before. Or certainly wouldn’t have given me much of a second (or first) glance because I wasn’t a hunky rugby bloke. Thank goodness.

I did spot a couple of names from other year groups that I remembered fondly, however, for a multitude of reasons, all of which seem blurred in the mists of forgotten times passed, notably from those summer years of 1983 and 1984; two summers that no matter how hard I want to try to forget always seem to crop up as some kind of mythical beginning of life; an awkward, blindingly bright and colourful start of something special. And in fact if truth be told it’s really more a case of those two years being a self-contained memento of a lost Me, a Me that dissolved in the years that followed to an essence configured by… by the glow of afternoon bicycle rides and evening beer supped obsessive meanderings of the soul. Shared with a small number of lost faces whose own lives must now be as mine, drifted off to the widening reaches of their own realms of realities, discovering their own truths and casting back, if they cast back at all, with similar sense of what they see being a dusty paperweight filled with sunlight and snowstorms, to one day roll to the floor and crash; each of us our own Citizen Kane with our own Rosebud lodged deep inside somewhere, itching on occasion no matter how much we know it doesn’t really matter. Or even really exist.

This is why it makes me feel alone: because no-one else will have the same moments as me to encase in glass. This is why it makes us all feel so alone. Because no matter how much we fool ourselves that we share a common frame of reference, that we are part of a collective memory, the fact remains that we aren’t, and that the only person we truly share those fragments with is our self. Maybe some people fool themselves about that better than others, better than me, but the essence remains: We’re all alone. And all the mediated casting backs to decades (just barely) passed is just a sham, one of those foggy notions that says there is a shared, collective memory to be tapped into; something that breeds pangs of the sweetest pain which in fact sharpen that sense of aloneness. Because it’s in the attempts to share that we sense the knowledge that no-one really shares anything at all.