Memento Memori

The (contestable) fact of a decade passing has been slow to come to my attention, and it was only really the appearance of the obligatory lists (particularly by writers whom I admire) that alerted me.  I have nothing in particular to rank — and what would you gain, gentle reader, if I told you that 2007 was better than 2002, for example? — but have been trying mentally to compile some chronologies that might sum up my experiences of the last ten years.

Normally I ignore the contention, both reasonable and logical, that a better measure of a decade is one that begins with 1 and continues through to (1)0, but on this occasion, this would be a more meaningful division for me.  I handed in my PhD in mid-2001, a fortnight or so after I started working in tertiary preparatory programmes, and defended it in either November or December of that year (I forget which).  This was the end of a period of continuous study that had various markers of “beginning” in the compulsory and non-compulsory sectors.  Since the ‘01, therefore, it’s been a different game I’ve been playing.

Professional life turned out to be far harder than I expected, not least because charm and a way with words are not in themselves enough to guarantee smooth sailing and swift pathways, but I feel satisfied with how I’ve resiled and withstood (if one can use the latter verb intransitively) during the subsequent years.  I feel a lot — a lot — older too, suspecting that I did a decade’s worth of maturing in about four years, hitting thirty mid-decade as if coming to the end of a mudslide, with a glass of sangria in my hand.

And of course there is the chain of relationships, friendly and fraught alike, that brought me to my present situation: via Mouthwash Man I spent more time with Dangermouse, who introduced me to Mariella, through whom I met Archie, who introduced me to Señor Mojito, who, among other things, knocked me up.  That linear summary isn’t the half of it, of course, for any of us, but a grand thing about the passing of a decade is consigning to the past those hard-won immunities that can’t be passed along the umbilical cord to the next generation.

My original thought for this post was to demonstrate a skill for which I have been historically pitied rather than admired — the ability to recall, fairly accurately, what I was doing on any nominated date — by making a chronology of new years’ adventures to cover the passing decade.  I am brought to a halt, however, by the fact that I cannot remember what I did on the night 2000 became 2001.  I don’t even know where I was: Bishopdale (the neighbourhood I was leaving) or Sockburn (the neighbourhood to which I was shortly returning)?  Did I phone my friends with whom I’d spent a happy northern summer that year, or did I stay in with cheese and cider?  I’d crashed my car at the beginning of December and might well still have been without transport.  Arthur at six-months-old would have been at maximum cuteness.  Perhaps I stayed in and played with him; that might be my preferred version of events.

I can’t offer any good reason for this memory blank, especially when other evenings, particularly the year prior and the year following, remain so vivid, but there it is.  A lost holiday, a short sojourn out of mind before everything changed.  It’s a function of the narcissism of journal-keeping that I find this more interesting that telling substantive stories of other recallable nights in any detail.  Having said that, I can remember clearly watching this on television twenty years ago (et in arcadia ego):