Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Summer Daze
All the things I know right now, if I'd only know them then...
Currently, I have two things: a newly-working scanner and an extensive photograph collection.
I mean, yes, I've got my hands, got my feet, got my heart, got my soul and, yes, my freedom, but right now the extensive photograph collection is proving interesting, to say the least.
At a conservative estimate, there are photograph wallets stretching back at least twelve years in here. Some of them relate to previous scanning attempts, but since the majority of them were probably lost in the Great Computer Fuckup of '09, it's worth scanning them all in again.
Memories, so big you can get lost in them...
For instance, there are quite a few photographs, pertinently, of the end of my first year last time around on the degree merry-go-round. Even though experience tells me otherwise, I desperately want to call them Class of Cirrhosis '99, being as most of them have an alcoholic drink in there somewhere. This isn't exactly unfair, because at least one of them did end up with cirrhosis of the liver, and I did hang around with a boozy bunch, the whereabouts of precisely one - the sensible one - I can trace now, ten years on, and only then because (a) sensible and (b) memorable surname.
Of the others, I know at least one dropped out and off the radar, and the others, no clue. That was, to be fair, a particularly weird social group, based entirely around hanging around the union bar. Not even the union union bar, considering we were something like seven tube stops from the main campus; no, this was a satellite union bar, for all those who didn't fancy the journey to the main union bar. You can possibly imagine the quality and style of people this attracted. The word 'calibre' springs to mind, but only in the case of 'small'.
I think these photos are of the last night on campus before going home for the summer. I say this only because at the end of the roll there are some shots of London by Night circa '99, where myself and two friends-at-the-time drove into the heart of London and out again, watching the sun go down. It was just about as cool as it sounds - so your mileage may vary - but it's also a timely reminder that, for me at least, friendships seem to have varying half-lives.
... Oh god. I've just reached the Polaroids from an old Joycam (tm) - a polaroid camera that too teeny, tiny photos - and I've just had to clean up what I'm hoping was dried coffee from the front of all of them, because if it was dried blood... Well... fuck.
Still, some cold water later, all good. This is a very, very strange experience, though, all tangled up in weird skeins of emotions long forgotten or long-hoped-forgotten.
Here's something. Go here for a moment and read up. (See? Educational and informative.) I've said it before, but none of you believed it then, so I'll say it again; working with Young People every day is a strange struggle not to Cassandra them into catatonia.
Students of 2010, I offer you one essential piece of advice:
Don't buy so much stupid shit!
This is less of a problem for you now than it was for my generation, such as I have one. Put it this way; look at your iTunes or your WMA files. If you've bought or downloaded your music from legitimate or illegitimate websites, then you have one distinct advantage on my generation, i.e. not having to own the bastard things physically.
Picture this, if you will. For me, first, there were cassette tapes; the advantage of these was being able to record whatever you wanted on to the blank ones (and I still have a soft spot in my heart for mixtapes) but the disadvantages were easy of breaking and the need to rewind them manually, like videotapes, to the point you wanted. Then came CDs; no recording what you liked - yet - but no rewinding, either, what with the whole 'track' thing. Then there were minidiscs, but the less said about them the better, although in passing it's worth noting that they combined the worst aspects of tapes - having, at least to begin with, to record songs in real time - with the worst aspects of CDs, i.e. they were a bugger to record over.
Then came .mp3s, and suddenly, slowly, a shift began towards a world where the physical form of the media didn't actually matter any more.
Which means that the five hundred odd CDs and DVDs are now a massive pain in the arse to store, but not as bad as the cassette tapes, floppy discs and goddamn video tapes currently clogging up the garage. Add to this the books I read for pleasure plus the books I read to study and hey, you can see my problem.
I tried to alleviate this last year. Ten dustbin bags of clothes, CDs, books and videos went to the charity shops. Another ten went to the local municipal dump. Curiously, this only seemed to make things worse. Suddenly, the upstairs storage was filled with boxes from the downstairs storage, and the downstairs storage couldn't even be gotten into without crampons and hefty climbing boots.
Like I say, this is less of a problem for The Current Generation, raised as they were on .mp3s, torrents, filesharing, and anything other than having to actually pay for the damn thing. And, without condoning criminal activity, good for them, because it means that, in ten years time, they won't be spending hours of their lives going over everything they every bought and trying to work out why they bought it in the first place...
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