Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Things I Have Learnt This Summer
... E-i-addio, I don't think so (to finish the title quotation).
So yes. I may not be able to find any work, but I have learnt a few important things recently.
Things that will fit in the back of a Nissan Micra
- A tumble dryer
- A single mattress
- A king-size mattress
The last one was kind of a stretch, and involved some duct tape, but nobody was hurt in the making of that film, so hey.
My music collection was bigger than I ever thought.
Put it this way. Before I even began this lunatic crusade to digitise my music collection, I sold around somewhere between fifty to a hundred CDs to my local CEX, forever earning their enmity primarily because that meant they had to check each and every one before they could admit it, and all for about thirty pounds worth of exchange value.
Since then, I discovered a further two boxes of CDs, which have comprised the majority of this digitising effort. The albums I'm going to try to sell - although the social contract means I should probably not use my local CEX anymore, primarily because they have my address and will probably send around ninja assassins if I turn up with another bag full of CDs and no intention of spending my money in their actual, y'know, shop - and the singles are going to charity shops. (I know, I know, lucky them.)
But put it this way. Looking through my music collection, I note that it appears that in the past I bought [or received as a journalist] an album or a single every one-and-one third weeks for the past fourteen years.
And what bugs me is that I don't quite know why it mattered so much back in the day to own so much music. Don't get me wrong, it was a long, torrid, sweaty, passionate and at times angry affair, and I still love music, but forty CDs a year for over a decade?
Hmm.
Even my DVD collection isn't that obsessive.
Naturally, everyone has their passion, from geologists to fashion designers. But for someone who only wrote about music semi-professionally for a third of the time period they were obtaining CDs for, that's... Well... That's not bad.
See, I'm kind of proud to have found proof of a passion for something, because the six years prior to my re-attaining Student Status were good years, but quiet, professional, and perhaps even slightly grey years nonetheless. So at least this helps prove that prior to that I had something that mattered, something to follow, and something to do.
That's why Student Status makes me happier now than it did that mythical First Time Around. The first time, I was doing it because it was the expected next progressional step; preschool, school, sixth form, university, job. The university was a waystation in my life - a lot like I see happening to the current crop of students - between the end of school and the beginning of The Working Years, during which one is supposed to 'find oneself' and work out exactly what sort of a human being you are in order to better fit into the wider world.
That kind of didn't happen for me the first time around, much to my chagrin.
This time round, it's a better fit but a different time, because I'm happy with the where and the what but not necessarily with the when, but hey, you can't change the when so why worry, as they apparently say.
So it's a positive experience, digitising all my music, because it proves to me that there was a time when I had that kind of misguided passion and that need to follow something, and sport never did it in the way that music could, so music was the world for those pretty years 95-05. So don't get me started on Britpop.
No, really. Don't get me started.
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