skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Five o'clock in a Friday night city centre is a special place. Picking your way across a road filled with snarled up traffic, you can sense a crackle in the air: energy, anticipation, expectation. Already, people are sucking hard on ciggies outside pubs and buskers by escalators advertise their MySpace pages on guitar cases as they seranade commuters with Oasis's best.
As you rush, caught up in the stream of humanity tasting the freedom of the weekend, you think how pleasant it would be if you too were on your way to the pub. You remember other Friday nights after work, fag in one hand, gin and tonic in the other. Friends and drinks and maybe dancing later. Or home to shower and change, TFI Friday on Channel 4, red wine, then out on the town. Bouncing along, buoyed up on the wave carrying you into the weekend; no time to stop to catch your breath.
Now, although I can feel those ripples of energy, they aren't strong enough to support me. I no longer have sufficient oomph of my own to sail into the weekend without stopping. Now at the end of the week, uncorking a bottle of wine is just about my limit.
So, that’s another weekend gone. You spend half the week looking forward to it, then, wham, bam, it’s passed you by in a blur. And, if you’re me, you probably haven’t managed to do half of the things you’d decided put off until the weekend.
Sometimes, I wish I could press a pause button on time. I spend so much time willing it to speed up (when I’m bored, when I’m skint and pay day seems a long way off), then looking back and asking myself: “Where did that day/week/month/year go?”
I’ve been watching and listening to the TV and radio coverage marking the 40th anniversary of the release of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I listened to that album a lot in the months before I went to university. It staggers me to think that it was 20 years ago this September that I went to uni. I was as distant then from the release of Sergeant Pepper’s as I am now from leaving home and striking out alone.
Andrew Marr’s A History of Modern Britain is fascinating me. The world he is describing seems distant and alien; but it’s not. Just look over your shoulder and crane your neck to see around that last bend in the road. I can’t believe it’s 25 years since the Falklands War. I can’t believe it’s already seven years since the Millennium. When I was a kid, I thought I’d be old when the year turned from 1999 to 2000. Perhaps I am.
Five o'clock in a Friday night city centre is a special place. Picking your way across a road filled with snarled up traffic, you can sense a crackle in the air: energy, anticipation, expectation. Already, people are sucking hard on ciggies outside pubs and buskers by escalators advertise their MySpace pages on guitar cases as they seranade commuters with Oasis's best.
