Someone's been off the caffeine for too long...

The day was bright and sunny, though not warm, almost like a summer’s morning before the heat begins. For some reason, I felt rather young, as if I was back in the pre-Cantabrigian days. Tending as I was to a nostalgia trip, I didn’t have time to write it up because I was off to Bath on a driving mission. Without a notebook. Now, I could live without my iPod; I could cope reasonably well without a cellphone; I could even go without my Powerbook for a day or two but I’m not sure I could deal with not being able to write when I wanted to. Given the beauty of the day, and my already nostalgic mood, being in Bath set off a veritable feast of context-dependent recall. So it was that for two hours I wandered the streets, paying less heed to the ‘here and now’ than to the ‘here and then’ (though luckily I didn’t get mugged), composing the thoughts that I shall hopefully now recall. Apologies if they read like an exercise in purplage, and I suggest nobody takes their veracity for granted…

So it was that I stepped from the car, and felt like I was back in the Summer of 2002, maybe 2003. Regressing, if you like,

to a time of regression, when at the last opportunity I’d set to creating an alternative, post-Norwegian teenagerhood for myself. My girl friends and I would roam the city between therapists’ appointments, and I’d discover new and exciting experiences like drinking at Starbucks and travelling by train (even though I already had a driving licence). Back then, the days were long and genial, and I prided myself on going for hours without food. We were all younger and more innocent then; even me. Future plans were vague and unimportant; relationships were something to be hinted at, bemused by, vaguely considered, never realised. Back before sin or salary or sophistication took us, or failed to take us, which became worse somewhere along the way.

Children played, birds sang, and I really didn’t care about the financial services industry.

Back then, graduation was just a pinprick of darkness on a doubtful horizon. It wasn’t something that we worried about; it was something that might never happen. I was learning a whole load of interesting stuff, about what we are and where we came from; I wasn’t in training to be a desk jockey; that never was the point of my degree. If there were expectations for the future, they might have involved suddenly being thirtyish and successful, with a flat in some Crescent or other, maybe a couple of sports cars. (We’d complain at the tour buses and the damage they were doing to our vaults). But without any thought of how to bridge the years between. So in essence still a child, in some ways like my concept of the city: seemingly sophisticated and grown-up and elegant, but safe, sheltered from realities, small and idealistic against its bigger neighbours; even anachronistic.

It was hard to remember when I had loved the city more than in those idealised, confabulated days. Never more than now, if those days were fictional but now is when you’re imagining them, you might argue. But I wouldn’t concede. Today the city was sharply focused in the winter haze, and I saw it with a clarity of eye and mind probably helped not a little by having gone coatless in January, and without tea for hours. But what made it special was the lustre of reminiscence, painting everything with layers of remembered times, remembered odours, remembered faces, some of them around me still, but changed irrevocably in currents of time, of growing up, of forgetting, and in the unreliable idealising of memory, refracting through the dull ache of nostalgia.

I walked through the park, where we’d seen the hot-air balloon, arms folded against the cold, yet not cold, just clear. In the sinking sun, dog owners greeted each other, and the city sunk below me into the mist. I turned the corner, for the car, for home, and 2006.

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Addenda:

1. If I get some writing published I can apply for work experience at the Guardian… This may not be the best article to suggest, though. Hehe. And I doubt they'd accept those articles in the school magazine from the best part of ten years ago...
2. Been reading an Oxford glossary (one of the first Google results when I went searching for the correct spelling of ‘Cantabrigiensis’) and realising I haven’t really gotten over leaving Cambridge so soon, and the uneasy feeling that I missed out on a lot. But of course the idealistic/horrific Brideshead-Revisted version that one reads about isn’t anything like the reality, so I probably shouldn’t feel that I had all that much of an inauthentic experience.
3. Subfusc for exams though, what’s that all about? Have you ever thought just how weird that would be? As if one needs to worry about one’s attire at that point. Crazy.