Continuing and concluding my self-indulgent speculations as to why I, nostalgic sentimentalist extraordinaire, didn't miss one of the seven houses I'd lived in over the course of twenty-eight years until well over a decade-plus later, permit me to milk the theme even further - but from a slightly different perspective. I think it's safe to assume (as mentioned in my previous post) that spending a large part of my everyday life in my old neighbourhood (seven hours at school a day for starters), accounts for the fact that no longer actually living there seemed to make no discernible difference to me at the time.
Perhaps another reason I only started to miss this particular house when I did had something to do with running into an old classmate from primary school in the neighbourhood shops across from my old home in 1984 or '85. ALEX LOWE by name, and as fine and decent a bloke as you could ever hope to meet. We exchanged greetings, enquired after one another's well-being, and then Alex asked: "Are you still living across the road?", nodding in the direction of my previous abode. He was surprised to learn that I'd moved away about twelve or thirteen years earlier, and it made me wonder how many other people I knew still thought I lived in a place I'd left almost half my life away at that point.
Talking of Alex (and veering wildly off topic), I hope he won't mind me recounting that he once appeared in our secondary school play as a fairy, uttering the immortal lines: "I'm a fairy, bright and gay, helping others every day!" I don't recall anything else about that play, but Alex's turn got such a huge laugh on the night that everyone remembered it - and constantly quoted the lines back to him in lisping, falsetto voice over the course of the next few terms. (I know I did, little bastich that I was.) He always took it in good humour, being the fine fellow he is.
I'd planned to expand the scope of this topic and try and explore (in an epic exercise in tedium) wider themes than I actually have. For example, what it is that draws us to our past and connects us to where we came from, and whether or not it has any bearing on the direction we take in life. Can a house in which we once stayed shape our perceptions of ourselves, or would we be precisely the same as we are regardless of the bricks and mortar which shield us from the elements? However, the realisation has now dawned on me that it's simply too big a concept to concisely and competently capture within the confines of a couple of blog posts or so - in an interesting and entertaining way, at least.
I'll have to content myself with the hope (slim as it may be) that I may have prompted some readers to indulge in a little quiet contemplation of whatever memories reside within the repositories of their own minds.
Or, failing that, helped cure them of their insomnia.
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