A penitent adrift in a sea of nostalgia-junkies.

Last summer during a brief lull in the vitally important IT work I joined a well known site designed to bring old friends back from their comfortable obscurity and confront them with, well myself I suppose. So many people who seemed exotic and exciting had spent so many years in a tax-office or an insurance company, and so many marriages had run aground. If, like me you are a slave to mental imagery, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, may also have been your first- choice visualisation. Like a lot of shy people on that site I didn’t provide a profile or a picture, that would be too much like wildly semaphoring with my oldest pants above my head and shouting, “over here, I’m right here look.” And then inviting constructive criticism from my peers.

“Are these the actual pants Mr Stimp?”
“That’s right guys, these are the actual pants that appear in the blog.”
“Awesome.”
“Gwyneth said ‘no way darling‘, but I insisted on keeping them in, they’re integral to that whole entry, I told her if the pants go, I walk. As you can see guys, in the final cut they stayed.”
“Awesome.”

Presumably, plenty of people would have correctly pictured me on that raft, probably as the idiot who has somehow conspired to lose his underwear in the shipwreck. The actual occupants of the raft that the painting was based on only managed to endure four days before succumbing to cannibalism, that doesn’t seem very long. I think I would have plumped for a couple more days of belt-tightening.

Aren’t we all like asteroids? Constantly circling on more or less the same orbit, now and again nudging into another asteroid, sometimes staying next to it, sometimes veering off to take up another place, but still in the same relative orbit. I don’t know what I thought had happened to people I’d lost contact with years ago, maybe they’d just disappeared or been Orwellian-esque unpersoned. I don’t remember thinking about them, and if I did they would have been locked in our mutual-time, never growing older, until that is, signing up to Friends-realistically for the morbidly sticky-beaked.

It turns out they hadn’t disappeared at all, they were still in the belt, still circling. One kind soul wrote very briefly and almost poetically in their concision: “ Do I remember you ?” I remembered him very well and consequently had to reply, “No, I'm afraid you don’t.”

I did write to a few and a few others wrote to me, because that’s what it’s all about and it was mostly kind of pointless, like swapping c.v.s to get non-existent jobs. When you haven’t seen someone for years, after the quantity and quality of children has been duly itemised, and the list of career-shifts or otherwise has been detailed, it comes down to the car that you’re driving. Every time I look at my present car, I forgive it for depreciating at a Zimbabwean-rate and it’s drink problem and it’s expensive shoes because it’s beautiful, so very, very beautiful.

These were people who I don’t know, and who don’t know me and were they ever close anyway? Were they there for me, for instance, when I felt so utterly alone, crying out helplessly in the darkness of my own soul, brought to my knees on the cold, hard floor of despair. Unable to escape the torment of my mind’s imprisonment, futilely praying to a God I’d never known, my heart wrung with a muted, but very real, fear that the rest of my life could be this and only this and no more? Of course they weren’t, but to be fair, nobody else was there either. That sticking lock on the bathroom door took some manly-jiggling that day, I thought it was all over. I have since left a screwdriver propped discreetly in one of the holes in the toothbrush holder. That might count as a useful tip, another one could be when the house is empty don’t lock the bathroom door. I can’t imagine it would be easy to write a wordy farewell note on a roll of Andrex Sublimely Soft with a blunt frosty-pink lippie.

More sadly introspective still.

I was naïvely surprised to find the page of my first serious girlfriend, just looking at her name written there, I admit hurt in a way that after so many years I didn’t think could happen. Life is full of surprises when you are as soft inside as a Tortilla wrap.
She was someone from way-back who was so significant at the time that it brought back a whole lot of memories, it actually brought back a whole lot of guilty memories, if ever there was a person who deserved so much better from me it was her. It was a first awkwardly-honest relationship that was so intense that it seemed, in hindsight, destined inevitably to burn-out completely. Maybe it was always going to finish, but I think I hastened the conclusion. For nearly two years we were, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating, two people trapped in a Greek tragedy of our own making. It kind of set the trend.

But it was important, those were formative years, I would have liked to have met her a few years later. There was a brief exchange of a few emails, which impressed her so much I think she decided I was a melancholic half-wit, I’m really not, I’m very cheerful, almost ebullient when I’m not typing; people prefix their questions to me with, “As a cheerful, almost ebullient half-wit Stimp, do you think that…”

Then she unfortunately just figuratively vanished again, I can’t blame her, could you imagine that a self-assured and successful woman would do otherwise? No, probably not. For two people who meant a lot to each other we never properly said goodbye the first time, and now we haven’t done again as strangers.

And not sadly, but still introspective of course.

After all this intrusive imposition on innocents, I thought it might be sensible to avoid one or two other ex-girlfriends on there, when the last thing I remember one saying to me was ’screw you Stimp’ (classy and to the point ), I can’t think we’re about to be reliving a whole lot of cherished moments in the near future. These are the sort of recollections I can happily deal with. Overlooking disbelief, I would make a tremendous Catholic, every day impatient priests would drag me out of the confessional, kicking and repenting, by the hairy collar of my industrial-strength high-visibility hair-shirt.

On a more uplifting note, and there has to be one always, there was some good to come from joining the site that reunites, I met up with someone for coffee in the metropolis that is Colchester and we had a few hours of memory-searching nostalgia. She had been just a good friend at school so it was a lot easier, she had hardly changed and she insisted I was still the same, which really wasn‘t very complimentary. I was taken right back to the sixth form common-room, which reminds me, I must go now to agonise about my hair, chew on some Polos and where’s that bottle of Blue Stratos.