What’s it called when you’re nostalgic for a period of time or a sequence of events that never were? When you hanker to revisit a set of emotions and situations that you know, in reality, that you never had? I find myself periodically – particularly on Friday afternoons when all I’ve got to do is knock out case studies – experiencing this in regard to my first job.
Working at Paragon, for the 20 months it lasted, was a bit mental. My sister died, I fell in love, I fell out of love, I got very sad, I started a life-long distrust of senior managers, I began to understand the difference between hard work and dossing about, and defiantly backed the latter as a career principle.
It was so volatile, seat-of-the-pants and emotional that I effectively left in a huff (as discussed elsewhere on this blog). And yet, and yet, I find myself wondering how Nicky, Nerys, Lisa, Chandra, Martin, Andy H, Karen and Russell are – where they’re at and what they’re doing, like we’re in some way still friends. In some cases, i wasn’t even great friends with some of the names in that list, but that just serves to mystify even more. Why should I still care? It was very formative I suppose. In truth, true friendship survives when both parties involved want it to in equal measure. None of those people have spoken to me in anger since Ieft in 2002/3 – jeez – but here I am, absent-mindedly googling them. I ran across this: http://magazinesfromthepast.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Search?search=kimber&fulltext=Search&ns0=1&ns14=1#
...which is about my first boss, from some sort of half-arsed archive of old magazines I worked on back when I was funner. How things have changed. I miss those guys, dammit. I think. Some of them. Maybe.
Off to the home of raw-sewage enthusiasts, overbearing vegans and renowned homosexuals tomorrow – sunny Brighton beckons. I’ve always found Brightonians to be terribly interested in telling you how amazing Brighton is, despite it being a slightly naffer version of Bournemouth with a shingle bank where the beach should be, galloping heroin addiction rates and about 2000% more fucked Cockneys than my erstwhile stomping-ground. It does, however, have a lot of well-appointed places to get riotiously hammered in before weaving one’s way back to the comparative familiarity of Oyster cards and silent, faintly sinister nightbuses, which is why we’re going.
I may blog from there in accordance with my stated aim of doing this every day for a month, but you never know, I might get my 4s pinched by a corn-fed seagull the size of a Dachshund. You never know.
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