Given it is New Year's Eve, rightly I should be looking back and looking forward. But I am not. Though in a way I am. I've been in this house nine years and had this desk for nearly a year. Yet it has taken me all this time to finally get myself snug and comfy in my own room-cum-office. I had too much artwork around the house. Before Christmas then, I and Julie, with her paintings, set to. Many have gone to the great gallery in the sky. Test pieces, sketches, half finished paintings which I can't remember starting. Old battered frames, old paintings which quite frankly should have gone to the tip aeons ago. I'm in a cleansing mood.
I'm getting really fed up with looking back all the time. I love history, I love a sense of the past, but I'm finding people discussing, "when we were young" a bit, well let's say, dull. I do it myself. I hear myself talking to the young bucks and does at work about music, films, events, and they look at me blankly. I didn't want to talk to my 50+ year old relatives in my twenties, so why should a 20 year old be interested in pop hits of 1980, 38 years ago. That's as far back for me when aged 20 in 1983 enjoying discussing pop hits and culture of 1945. I have no connection with 1945 other than WW2 ended, and my father is still fighting Jerry while watching Dad's Army.
Recently, partly as 2018 has been mostly an Anus Horribleness (no spelling error there then), I have thought more about thinking only forward. My cousin Nigel once said we find time passes too fast in adulthood as we keep looking backwards and being shocked at how long ago something was, and not looking forwards as children do which seems to take an age to reach the day in question. As children we always looked forward to ice creams, a smack around the head for scrumping apples, rickets, small pox, being shot at by David Scollan and his air pistol, and a shy walk and maybe a kiss with one of the female members of the gang during school holidays. As a result time stood still. We were bored, we longed for the school gates to close and set us free like a plague of cockroaches across the village. But above all time seemed endless, and all that boredom was creative. Of course time then wasn't endless. 60 minutes in 1980 is almost identical as 60 minutes on the last day of 2018. I say almost as one day is equal to between 3,599 and 3,601 seconds depending on certain constants of time. Lets not go there.
Let me just say my world is changing. Yes I love old furniture, I love history, I love having an office with walls now quivering under the weight of both my and Julie's artwork (offers to buy accepted), but I don't want to keep harking back to 'when I did whatever I did in my youth'. As the old year ends then and the new year races over the horizon like a stallion after the moonstone, I will wish everyone a very happy New Year and hope they too look forward to 2019.... just forward... or as the beginning of 'Don't Look Back in Anger by Oasis rocked out...
Slip inside the eye of your mind
Don't you know you might find
A better place to play
You said that you'd never been
But all the things that you've seen
Will slowly fade away
PS: I can't believe that was 22 years ago.
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