The Clear Out

We've all been there, right?

You sort through an old box of high school jotters from the attic and have one last nostalgic look at your school days before throwing them out. It feels kind of sad chucking them all in the recycle bin but you just don’t have the space or time to store or peruse them all, and you doubt your family would find them very interesting. Ultimately though you can't shake the feeling you're somehow inhaling the dead skin cells of your old teachers...

But a few things struck me.

1. I never use any of that maths. Algebra, graphs, trigonometry and all that, it turned out, apart from being a stepping stone into university, was a waste of time. Maybe if I’d kept going down the academic road it might have been useful, but the choices I made ultimately lead to an intellectual cultural-de-sac. All those hours spent on French and German. Gone up in smoke. Only my 1st and 2nd Year English jotters filled with stories I saved from the blue bin of doom.

Pythagoras' Theorem has actually helped me to cross parks faster

2. Some of the handouts were still useful even now, such as ‘How to Make electricity’ or ‘What is poison rain?’ or ‘What is a virus?’ And I’ve kept them, along with any decent booklets.

3. I was (was?) quite immature for my age. All through the jotters are doodles and daft jokes and weird concepts. It’s surprising I ever passed anything. I ought to ease up on my own son.

4. Where were the real ‘useful to life’ notes? Like: 

• Health and Nutrition? 
• Mental Wellbeing? 
• Relationships?  
• How to combat Global Warming? 
• Self Reliance? 
• Renewable Energy Generation? 
• Growing your own Fruit and Vegetables?  
• The Dangers of Social Media? 
• Staying Focussed? 
• Organisation? 
• Business? 
• Car Maintenance? 
• SEO? 
• How to get More Followers? 
• How to Create Engaging Posts? 
• How to Get Rich Making and Playing Video Games? 

But of course half of those were not an issue in the 90s and the other half I wasn’t interested in.

5. I was not bad at doodling but never pursued it. I remember saying to someone when they asked what I wanted to do with my life was to be a cartoonist. Their reply was that it wasn’t a real job and I could do that in my free time. Probably true, but that was the end of my cartooning aspirations. Later I learned that cartoonists can earn up to £200 a day.

6. Where were my old diaries?

From the age of 15 onwards (1991) I kept intermittent diaries, usually the hardback day-to-a-page ones from John Menzies. It was nigh on impossible to write a page every day, and the guilt from having so many blank pages eventually lead me to abandon that format in my later years for regular notebooks without dates. 

Anyway, on New Year’s Eve I would sit down and read through all I’d written that year and enjoy a good old chuckle at my past self’s expense. Now I’m 46 I don’t do that anymore. Who has the time to write a diary these days, let alone sit down and read it again?

No-one. Because life is too fast and furious. We’re rattling around like a steel orbs in a pinball game, bouncing off the internet, the news, social media, websites, people’s expectations, 24/7 business, a constant barrage of advertising and people clamouring to be noticed. Lights flash, bells ding, no-one has time or energy to think. 

The planet that never sleeps.

But what’s going to happen to my diaries when I’m dead and gone? Will my family read them? Will anyone care? Will they just throw them out to be lost forever? My son might read them, but why should I expect him to sit down and plow through 8 or 9 volumes of handwritten stream of consciousness, some of which might not be suitable (let alone legible) for his eyes?

So I’ve come to realise that I need an editor. And a typist. But I can’t afford either.

As usual, it's just me.

So I’ve fished them out and as a side project (as if I don’t have enough side projects already) I may type up any interesting bits and publish them here on my blog.

90s nostalgia and teenage angst. Coming soon.