I'm just guessing about the year for this one.

In 1995 I worked for a company called First Information Group, coding a kids' game, Stringalongs, based on an implausibly-successful paper-and-string product of the same name. A game unique even in my ill-fated work history for being finished, delivered, pressed and packaged -- and then, at the eleventh hour, landfilled -- not once, but twice. I never really got to grips with the management structure of this company, but somewhere higher up in it than my team was a woman called Fairlie Gibson. You don't tend to meet a lot of Fairlies, so this was a memorable name. I certainly remembered it from my childhood, and from occasional mentions in subsequent years.

Fairlie, you see, had lived with my parents back in the day. In Bolton, I think. I can't say if my home in that period qualified as a proper commune, but whatever it was, Fairlie was a part of it.

Small world, eh?

More surprisingly, given that when we parted I was maybe four or five, she also remembered me. I mean, I can't say she would have picked me out in a police line-up, and my name is considerably less distinctive than hers, but one way or another she was able to put two and two together to make a speculative four; and thus we reconnected. Not bosom buddies, but people with a shared past.

A shared past with considerably more scope to embarass one of the parties than the other.

Some time into my tenure at FIG, my birthday came around. 28, if memory serves. (Fuck, what a long time ago this all was.) No huge deal, but at its marking Fairlie presented me with this picture of myself as a child.

Take a good look at the picture. Was that a nice thing to do? What twentysomething fag-about-town wants to know that he once looked like that?

But this thirtysomething fag-about-town has to admit that, yes, it was a very nice thing to do. However superficially cringe-inducing, this photo is not only an intriguing data point, it's also pretty cute. Evidence of a really ghastly period in popular fashion, and a warning to parents everywhere not to fall prey to such things, but cute all the same.

Yay for the awfulness of the past. Where would we be without it?
Posted by matt at August 25, 2003 04:07 AM