Say goodbye to another life.

I'm, I guess, 8 or 9; my father almost exactly the age I am now (and wearing it pretty well, don't you think?)

We are seen here packing up to move from Salford to London. As far as the North goes, that was pretty much that. I think we went back for a flying visit once, but I don't really remember. A couple of decades later I was briefly in Manchester a couple of times -- mostly being a big poof -- but it might as well have been Ulan Bator for all I knew about it, the connection I felt.

This discarding of the past isn't surprising in a 9 year old, but it has turned out to be a pretty consistent pattern in my life. I don't maintain connections, with places, with people. I'm very bad at keeping in touch. Out of sight really is out of my mind.

It all must have seemed so important at the time. I imagine. Those places I lived, those people I loved, the things we did. Sometimes, without really making a special effort to be so, they are still around; sometimes, unexpectedly, they reappear. Very occasionally, I make some half-baked attempt to revive them. Most often, though, they drift away, and are forgotten, and then years later I suddenly think of them and wonder where they went. Were they ever there at all?

I suppose there is an element in this album and this weblog of trying to pin some of that down. Not that you can ever go back -- not that I would want to if you could -- but just as something to look at and say, oh yes, there was that, there was them, there was there. Something to point to and say: yes, it did happen; and yes, it really was important at the time; and yes, that means it's important now.

That effort, of course, is doomed to fail.
Posted by matt at September 17, 2003 03:41 PM