Staying Lost

When I moved from Australia to the UK ten years ago, one of the biggest challenges was deciding what to do with my books and music. Like many collectors, I'd accumulated far more than I could comfortably justify, yet each item had seemed important enough to acquire in the first place. Even after a fairly ruthless cull, dozens of boxes departed for my new home.

Once we arrived, we moved into a small house and virtually all my music and books went straight into storage. They were there, in limbo, far longer than I would have liked.

We moved into our current home a few years ago.  I was able to unpack my vinyl, and realised immediately that several hundred records were missing. Somewhere between Australia and the UK, a few boxes had gone missing. It was immensely frustrating, and so I started a spreadsheet of the missing titles, or at least those I could remember.

As I wrote in my last post, I've finally been able to start unpacking my book collection. Now that the cataloguing is almost complete, I can see that half a dozen titles are missing. I therefore assume that at least one box of books disappeared as well.

Insurance can’t come into play, as I didn't discover the loss when it happened. I discovered it years later. Even so, I have managed to replace a fair number of the missing records. I pick them up when I see them at a cheap price.  That is, if I still want them.

That’s the unexpected realisation. Faced with the knowledge that certain items had vanished, I found myself considering whether I actually needed them back. Some, certainly. There are some items that still matter enormously to me, but I’m no longer the completist I used to be. 

There are still parts of my collection where I want it all. Not every edition, variation and release, but one of each. I don’t need five copies of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, or the French, German and Peruvian releases of Abbey Road, but Philip K. Dick and The Beatles, amongst others, are an important interest that has been constant for many decades.  These are authors and artists I adore, so I do want all their titles and I return to them often. As a result, some titles are on a wants list and have already found their way back onto the shelves. Others have remained absent, and I no longer feel any urgency to track them down.

Some of the missing items I'd owned them for years, perhaps decades, but if I was honest with myself I hadn't listened to them, read them or even thought about them for a very long time. Their disappearance was annoying at the time. Now, not so much.

That distinction has become increasingly important. As I continue unpacking, I'm finding myself making decisions about what stays and what goes. That's not a judgement on their quality. Some excellent books have left the house recently, while others almost certainly will. It's simply an acceptance that shelf space is finite.

The younger version of me viewed a collection rather differently. Back then, ownership itself had value. There was satisfaction in complete sets, in knowing that a particular series, author or artist was fully represented. I still understand that desire, but I now recognise that I don’t need everything. I just don't feel a need to replace all that is gone.

Age? Experience? A changing philosophical viewpoint?  I don’t really know. What I do know is that the collection emerging from those boxes and enduring my cull is much smaller than the one that left Australia. The shelves are becoming more relevant, more manageable and more meaningful. The books and records that remain are the ones I genuinely want to live with.

The Sense of Wonder.

I've recently been unboxing books that have been in storage for years. There were always books on my shelves. There had to be. I could never manage without being surrounded by at least some of them. Many more, though, spent years sealed away in boxes in the garage. Now that I've finally sorted the shelving, they're gradually making their way back into the house.

I always knew what I owned. My database kept track of that for me. What I didn't have was easy access to much of the collection. As each box is opened, I check every book against the catalogue, confirm the edition, correct the occasional mistake, update the tags and replace cover images where necessary. It's wonderful to be reuniting with these old friends.

This process throws up the occasional surprise. Every now and then I find a duplicate, a book that somehow slipped through the net and never made it into the catalogue in the first place, or a forgotten signed copy. There are also those books that, despite the database, had completely slipped from my memory.

I've found myself pausing a lot to look at the cover art. I know we can't judge a book by its cover, but we do anyway. When I was younger and trawling second-hand bookshops and market stalls for science fiction novels, the cover often played a significant part in my purchasing. If the book was by a favourite or familiar author but the title was unknown to me, the decision was usually easy enough. Venturing into completely unknown names was different. Then I was relying on a combination of an intriguing blurb and a promising cover.

Looking at these old paperbacks again, I'm reminded just how much the artwork meant to me. I have vivid memories of lying on the living room floor with an Asimov novel beside me and staring at a Chris Foss cover until the image was permanently lodged in my imagination. Those vast spacecraft, impossible structures and alien landscapes promised a whole universe of exploration and discovery.

I once saw a comment that modern covers are designed, whereas older covers were art. Sure, the old covers didn't always match the story, but that almost seems irrelevant. They weren't simply trying to tell you what sort of book you were holding. They were trying to capture a mood, an idea, a sense of wonder and awe. A Chris Foss cover didn't need to be an accurate depiction of anything, it just needed to excite your imagination.

Perhaps that is why so much modern cover art doesn't appeal to me. Digital artists can create images of extraordinary complexity and detail. Yet many modern covers feel as though they have been assembled rather than painted. What they rarely do is stop me in my tracks and make me wonder. When I look at an old Foss, Pennington or Elson cover, I don't just see a book cover. I see a universe waiting. Forty years later they still make me want to pick up the book and see where it will take me.

I think the same distinction applies to the stories themselves. Modern publishing often feels highly designed. Writers have access to endless advice on structure, pacing, character arcs and plotting. Manuscripts pass through rounds of drafts, workshops, beta readers and professional editors. The results are often technically excellent, but I sometimes feel as though the life has been edited out of them. They are polished, refined and carefully constructed, yet most don't excite me the way older books do. The rough edges have gone, but so has some of the spontaneity.

Many of the older science fiction novels sitting on my shelves feel different. Not necessarily better. Often they are far less polished. The dialogue can be clunky, the characters sometimes thin and the plots occasionally held together with little more than enthusiasm. Their imagination is front and foremost.

It was more difficult to produce eighteen drafts when you were hammering away at a typewriter and producing carbon copies, and I suspect that's a big part of it. The writer reached a point where they were simply done. By modern standards that almost sounds reckless, yet some of those books still contain ideas and images that have stayed with me for more than forty years.

And so I continue to return to them. I still read contemporary science fiction and occasionally discover something wonderful, but when I think about Science Fiction, it is usually those older paperbacks that come to mind. I have found my niche. They speak to me. They still carry that sense of wonder that first drew me to the genre.

As I unpack these boxes, I'm finding books that I haven't really seen for many years.  And those covers still have exactly the same effect on me that they did when I first saw them. That sense of wonder has returned and I once again want to dive into those pages, to go and explore the universe..

Life, the Universe and Everything.

I went to a double funeral during the week.

My mate's wife passed away about a month ago. He passed away five days later. He was 92, she was 91. It wasn't really a surprise as neither had been well. I last saw him about six weeks before he died. He'd been in hospital and looked tired. The sparkle had gone from his eyes and he seemed like he'd simply had enough. Not in a dramatic sense. More that he was weary and was ready.
It wasn't a shock when I got the call, but a realisation. He was the first of the gang to leave us.

A few years ago I started going to the club once a week, hoping to meet some people, to make friends. I'd sit in the corner with a pint and a book. A bunch of people played backgammon in another corner, while a few groups of people huddled around small tables chatting and sipping their beers. One week, a guy in one of the groups told me to put the book away and come and join them. We became friends quickly, and now they are my gang, the guys I see each week for a drink at the club. There are seven of us who sit and chat and laugh. And we laugh lots. Our regular table, our regular seats. The in-jokes, the local news, restaurant reviews and so on. 

I'm the youngest, but in any group someone has to play that role. One of the guys, a year older than me, is a huge music fan as well.  I'm Beatles, he's Bowie.  And so the two of us discuss music, releases and rumours. The others are older, and we discuss life, the universe and everything.

Like all good friendship groups, ours has developed its own personality over the years. You know who will arrive first, who will tell the longest story, who will have an opinion on whatever topic comes up. The conversations wander all over the place and often end somewhere completely unexpected. My friend had his own place in the group. His own stories, opinions and observations. He had a dry wit and shared my sense of humour. We "got" each other. There were times I'd say something, and the others would nod, but he'd glance over at me and smirk. He'd throw out a line, and I'd look over to see him gazing back, wanting to see if I'd caught it. I sat at his funeral. To my right, only a few feet away, was a floor-to-ceiling window looking out onto a stone garden with a small beck running through it. For the entire ceremony, two ducks were no more than fifteen feet from me. One paddled in the beck. The other wandered over the stones, pecking around as if it had important duck business to attend to.

My eyes and mind kept returning to them. It was calming and comforting. While we sat inside reflecting on lives that had ended, the world outside was simply carrying on as normal. The circle of life, of being alive.

His seat at the club still sits vacant. It's not sacred, it's not a memorial, it's just that no one has moved into it yet. But I do find myself wondering who will be the next recruit. The next person who walks into the club looking for company and ends up being told to put their book away and join us.

Groups like ours can't stay the same forever. We've talked about this, my music friend and I. One day we'll be the elder statesmen and others will be occupying the seats. They'll never know the man who used to sit up one end, but they'll become part of the tale. They'll inherit the stories, the jokes, the restaurant reviews and the discussions about music.

And before long they'll be sharing stories of their own around the same table.

Frozen in Time.

It's ten years since I moved from Australia. My friends and I try to keep in touch, but the truth is we're in different worlds, different time-zones, and our lives are moving in different directions.  It's always great to see them when I visit, but then I get back here and we fall back into our quite irregular contact.

Last week I was thinking about people I knew before I  moved here. Not friends, as such, but people I worked with, people I saw at social events, even students. Some of them I see online.  It's great to see ex-students, for example, getting older, finding careers, getting married and having children. Not all the people I knew back then are online or in my friendship group.

I found myself wondering how an old student was getting on, and I realised that for me that person is still about 16 years old.  I've not seen or heard anything about them since I last taught them, so in my mind they haven't aged at all. They're not going to be like that now, of course, but that is how I see them.

This happens to everyone when we move out of their circle.  We preserve them in time, at the age and stage of life we knew them.  The teacher at school is still 35 and eating a packed lunch out of a paper bag, the neighbour is still listening to the Allman Brothers at high volume, the student never quite leaves school.

But we move on. We grow, evolve, change. We gather experience and learn. Misfortune occurs and our worldview alters, and sometimes our personalities. Careers advance or change, children are born, grey hair appears.  Decades pass, and my high-school friend is still a sixteen year old lover of football,  not the CEO of a tech company.

Surely there is someone in Australia who remembers me as the twenty-five year old colleague, the 40 year old student, the 50 year old teacher. They have no reason to update that picture, and I can guarantee they wouldn't even be able to imagine much of what I do these days.

Soon I will be catching up with an old friend, my best friend from High School. We last spent any real time together when I was around nineteen. Over the years we bumped into each other occasionally, and it was great to chat and laugh. He's not on social media, but we've kept in minimal contact through his wife. Now they're coming here, and we'll be catching up over dinner.  Our first proper catchup since the early 80s.

I know what he's been doing, I know where his life took him.  I have some idea of what he's doing now.  But to me there is still so much of him that is the eighteen year old friend who shared so much time with me.

I'm really looking forward to it.

I'll Take The Low Road.

A few weeks ago, I quietly slipped up to Scotland for a week. This was not just a holiday, a trip to catch up with relatives, or a spur-of-the-moment getaway. The journey was conceived in the week after my dad passed away at the end of last year. I could not get back to Australia for the funeral, so I decided instead to visit Scotland, to honour his life and spend some time in reflection. And to explore my own legacy, my own history, my own origins.

While planning the trip, I chose not to visit Aberdeen, where Dad was born and raised. I have been there several times over the years and I love it, but I realised that he was more than his hometown. There was also my own connection to consider. I was born in the Highlands, where Dad was posted as a policeman.

I made a list of places I wanted to visit and explore, each chosen with care for its connection to him. Many were places I had not seen since the mid 80s and barely remembered, yet each carried some association with Dad, something meaningful to me.

The west coast, for example. I know he loved that side of the country, and I have a lasting memory of us there together in the 80s. Pitlochry, where Mum and Dad honeymooned. And, of course, Inverness, where I was born, and Nairn, where I lived.

There were also a few places I wanted to visit for my own interest, places where I might stop for an hour and have a look around, so I added them to the list.

 
I was stunned when I mapped the trip out and everything fell into an almost perfect loop. Nothing I had chosen needed to be cut for being too far out of the way. Everything seemed to fit. It all just fell into place.

Planning what to bring followed naturally, items to accompany the journey. A book, one of Dad’s favourites about Scotland. A playlist of Scottish music, from traditional through to modern. Photographs of Dad and me, Mum and me when I was a baby, and so on. A few other things to help me reflect. And a journal to record the entire trip.

Everything I set out to do was achieved. Every planned stop was visited. All I was looking for was found - in places, in things, and within myself. I learned a lot, and I came to a lot of realisations about my own identity - including things I have carried and struggled with since I was young.

 
Dad was with me, in… well, I suppose “in spirit” is the closest I can get. I could visualise him beside me as I drove, as I stood outside his now derelict police station, walked his old beat, and looked up at the window into the room where he once held me in his arms. Mum was there too, through messages and video calls, even walking with me around the streets where she had lived as a young wife and mother.

The trip exceeded all expectations. Just the right length, just the right stops and stays, and just the right balance of exploration. And then home, enfolded back into my regular life, now possessing a deeper sense of who I am.

A Non-Post.

Every few weeks this blog reminds me it wants an update. It did this morning, and so a few hours ago I sat down to write a post. I stared at the screen for a few minutes before I wrote a few lines, deleted them, wrote a few more, deleted them, and tried once more before turning the machine off.

Some days are like that. Either the idea you have doesn't pan out, or you've forgotten the brilliant idea you had last night, or the inspiration you so hoped for as you stare at the screen simply chooses not to arrive. I'd rather not force it when nothing immediately pops into my brain, but later in the day that itching returned. I then sat down and tried again, so here we are - writing about how I have nothing to write about.

Fiction writing can be like that too. Nothing for a long time, then recently, suddenly, a moment of inspiration. Sat down and wrote 600 words in a single session. I shaped them, teased them, tweaked them, and juggled them into words I really liked. And then a couple of days later when I returned to them, they were gone. I'd saved them, and I was able to recover the file, but it had been written over and so the words were not recoverable. I'd accidentally deleted it somehow.

Now I have to work out how to recapture that writing. I was really happy with those words, and now I'm worried I won't get near them again. I just need to overcome that concern and just go for it - new, better words, I hope.

After all, they are just words.

The Times They Are A-Changing.

There's a lot going on at the moment, although I probably could have said that any time in the past fifteen years or so. But it truly does feel like it's busier than ever.

Partly it is because there is a lot going on.  The University is going through yet another round of redundancies, and so there is tension and stress. It's not always obvious, but it's there, lurking underneath. People leave, and are not replaced so everyone needs to cover those roles, even though most are already overloaded. Colleagues look tired.

My role at work has changed, and so has the structure around me. And while it is ideal for me and I enjoy it, the role has its own challenges. 

Generally, work isn't what it used to be. And all must be measured. Everything seems to be data driven these days, and I'm not convinced it actually leads to better outcomes. The resulting data might say it has, but some of the best outcomes can never be quantified. 

It's no wonder so many colleagues are accepting packages and leaving.  But this is true across the board - it's not just my employer, or even the Higher Education field. It seems to be work generally.

As we speed towards (or has sped past?) the technological singularity, the world is changing rapidly. We need to recognise that, do our best to adapt and hang on for the ride.

There's a lot to be excited about.