Scraps of a Younger Man

Here are some things that I found in my file of assorted personal artifacts. Nothing can quite top Analysing Shadows, but these snippets might create a mosaic of my personality at the time. Most of these come from when I had just started University. So I would have been about 18.

There's a lot of Fresher's induction stuff, taunting me with all the possible fun that I wasn't destined to enjoy.

(That's not really true - I did have a lot of fun, but probably not in the same way that normal people did. And at Oxford, I think even the normal people were pretty odd by most standards.)

I've taken pictures with my laptop's camera, which are almost unvisible (if not invisible). A scanner would be useful. Never mind. Perhaps the blur and murk (blurk) will help convey a wistful sense of nostalgia.

There's a passport photo of myself looking glum and young. And glung. Nowadays, I'm generally glold.

I can imagine having this taken before I left home, dreading every aspect of University. I don't look impressed. But I look much less like a terrorist than I do now.

The good thing about having a beard is that I can look back on myself as a youngster and not be shocked by how much I've aged. Most of my face is hidden behind black Brillo-pad face fur. I'm attempting to hide my features from the passage of time.

And when I shave off my beard, I already look much younger in contrast. I also walk with a cane, dye my hair grey and reminisce about the war, just so I can stop doing those things and feel like a real whippersnapper (also, I stop using words like 'whippersnapper').

At Uni, I used to write all my notes on shabby ring-bound notepaper. I once handed in a few of these pages instead of my economics work, and was mocked by my tutor. And my so-called friends.

I'm not still bitter about it.

Nope.

This blog is the modern equivalent of those pages: just as poorly thought-through, if a little more legible.

This first sheet has a Blake quote on it:

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.

I have no idea why I wrote this down. I never studied Blake, and I'm not sure what relevance it has.

I think my purpose in keeping this quote must have been in anticipating my older self discovering it, displaying it to others, and suggesting to strangers that I was quite clever and poetic. Which I obviously was.

Good work, Young Paul.

There's also the notes for a mixtape I made for Lucy. Yes, not only am I literary, I'm also musical and romantic. I really am quite special.

This was my attempt to get her to notice me, demonstrating my sensitivity through the whiny songs of idiots.

I worked out the playlist in tremendous detail, not wanting any extra space on the cassette.

Remember those?

Cassettes?

The full thing was a bit like this (with some tracks missing):

LAS (sorry if you don't have Spotify).

Of course on the real thing, the songs were interspersed with me wailing and screaming. But that's what people did back in the 00s.

On other cool bit of paper in my folder is my acceptance letter from Mansfield College. I was offered a place if I got the required grades (I didn't, but they let me in anyway). But that's not so interesting. What's better is what I've scribbled on the back.


On the left-hand side is some formal logic, which I did in my first year. It's a sort of weird pseudo-maths, used to analyse arguments and stuff. It looks a bit like this: x y (P(x) Q(x,f(x),z))

So, not only am I a poet, a romantic, and a musician, I'm also a scholar. I'm a real renaissance man.

The good thing about logic is that (at the level I was working at - ie. low) it was quite easy, but looked complicated. It was a good way to make myself look clever.

And on the right of the page, upside down, is a chord progression for one of my presumably brilliant (and not at all whiny) teenage songs. I wrote some pretty incendiary songs back then. I was a real firebrand. Probably would have released an album if THE MAN hadn't kept me down.

So from these samples of my student life, you may think either:
a) I was a troubled genius, with my finger in many pies
or
b) I was a pretentious idiot, with my finger up my own arsehole

The truth is probably not as glamorous as either. I only chose these things as the most interesting. And that should tell you something. Most of the stuff in the folder is boring: bank statements, maps, tedious forms. But you can always cherry-pick incidents to make your life sound more exciting.

That's how my autobiography is going to work.

That's all for now. I'm not sure if there's much else of interest.

Except of course for the posters for Edamnation; a cheese-based horror film I devised in A-Level Media Studies.

Which sounds like one of my stupid wacky made-up lies, but is actually true.