I thought I’d write a post based around thoughts rather than events for once, which I realise can sometimes just be an excuse to be morose. I’m not, though. I do feel what I always feel the night before going back to Cambridge: a sense of impending dislocation and readjustment, not because I enjoy the term any less, but just because all of my routines and friendships have to be reorientated again. And then there’s the highly stressful thought of upcoming exams. So the superposition of dislocation and stress does create some melancholy, but it’s not primary melancholy but instead a secondary artefact of two separate emotions, if you see what I mean. (I’m sure you don’t, since I’m conceiving of emotions as waves in the A-Level Physics sense, which is neither a particularly normal or rhetorically helpful thing to do. But I’m going to run with just a little bit further, because I’m about to say that I’m focusing this melancholy wave onto the screen of nostalgia.)

My response is to focus this melancholy wave onto the screen of nostalgia. Well, not quite nostalgia. I’m not longing for the past exactly, but through the miracle of fastidious archiving I am in closer contact with it than might be wise. My e-mails, for example, go back to at least 2002. (You can mock this attention to holding on to data, but consider that at least I’ve never had to ask you for your phone number twice.) And obviously lots of snippets from the past are dreadfully boring, but they’re still captivatingly addictive to explore. Witness, for example, this slightly bizarre missive to the Labour party (why?!) from 2004. (I was 15 and should have been doing other things – deal with it.)

But will Labour ever return to the idea of real equality? Of taxing the rich to help the poor? Of stopping corporations have too much power? Public ownership? Are you still even socialist?

And then there are the things that never change. From almost exactly two years ago:

Sorry – I have tried to fiddle my calendar but in my one or two free days I really really do need to work. Scary how the Easter holidays disappear so fast

(One day, the exam cycle really will end and I shall be free! Might be dead by then, of course…)

Oh, and to all of those people who became entangled in my e-mail archives over the years and have never managed to escape… thank you

« Peggle ‘n’ Pizza (‘n’ Scrabble ‘n’ Milkshake) | On the many useful and assistive features of noses »