I often find my mind returning to topics I've attempted to explore before on the blog, which may be boring to some (or many) of you, but I'm never quite satisfied with what I said previously, prompting me to have another go. However, between thinking of something new to say on an old subject and sitting down to write about it, I find the thoughts I wished to express have dissipated, resulting in me just basically repeating what I'd written before. It's obviously never my intention to repeat myself, and I venture on in the hope that writing about it will trigger remembrance of whatever new material I wanted to add. This is another such instance.
As I've said before on occasion, when we're growing up, we do so mainly unselfconsciously, seeming to seamlessly segue from one point in our childhood to another. At 11, do we really feel any different to how we felt at 7, or at 15, to how we felt at 12? I'd say probably not, and I offer the following as evidence to be considered. When I revisited my old primary school as an 18 year old, I was much surprised to see how small and low the desks were, as well as the sinks and mirrors in the toilets. I almost felt like Gulliver, because it had never before occurred to me that, in primary schools, some things have to be built to child-scale. It seems such an obvious thing when you think about it, but we never do, do we? I certainly didn't.
There are various stages of life we go through while growing up; infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, etc., and there's a time when it all appears to unfold like an unravelling ball of string. Years later, however, perhaps after we turn 30 or so, when we look back, those various stages of our lives seem like separate segments. Figuratively speaking, our box of memories go from being like an endless row of terraced houses to being detached dwellings. In close proximity to one another sure enough, but with that little space between them that puts them in their own little compartments of the mind.
When I was a teenager, my childhood years seemed relatively recent and not too long ago. But, to contradict myself (an unavoidable result of the paradox of time), sometimes they could feel like an eternity away - it just depended on from what angle I approached my memories. If a sudden remembrance resurfaces unbidden, it feels like only yesterday because it jumped straight into our mind. If, however, we trawl through our memories in search of a particular one, the distance between then and now seems greater, perhaps due to other, intervening memories obscuring the 'view' and putting things in their proper perspective and context.
But even that doesn't do full justice to the notion I'm trying to express. Trying to pin anything down is difficult, because my thoughts waver in the wind and shift their shape like a phantom in the fog. When I first moved into my present house back in 1972, the years prior to that date seemed relatively recent - as if they all rested on the same figurative 'stretch of carpet' as the present. It probably also helped that because our new house was similar in layout to an earlier one in the same neighbourhood (though at the opposite end of it), there was a 'pre-existing' sense of familiarity in our new residence - enhanced by the fact we had the same furniture in all four houses we'd lived in up to that point.
And talking of points, where am I going with this? As I've said before somewhere, my first day in our new house was just (obviously) the day after the last day in our old one, so there was a sense of consistency and continuity based on the fact all my recent memories were of events that had transpired in that old house. It took a while to gather a fresh set of memories associated with our new one. Now, however, after so many decades, there seems to be an immense gap between my time in each house, so what once still felt part of the present now feels like the dim and distant past - which, I suppose, it is.
As a 14 year old living in a new house, I didn't feel too far removed from our old one in which I'd spent nearly seven years of my childhood. It didn't occur to me at the time (because my childhood still felt recent - perhaps even current), but the fact that the fields and the swing-parks and the streets of the new neighbourhood were not the ones in which I played, ran around in, or where I hung out with the neighbourhood kids, now makes me realise my childhood belongs in a different place, not this one. And that's a result of that unfurling ball of string which is our lives becoming frayed and disconnected over the years and 'terraced memories' becoming 'detached' (or in some instances 'semi-detached') ones.
When I was younger, whenever I thought of a past event, it was like opening a door in the 'room' of my mind through which I could access it; and, if I so wished, I could open another door in the same room to access another memory. Now, though, when I open that second door, there seems to be a long, empty corridor stretching into infinity leading to it, and beyond that memory, another long empty corridor that leads to the door of another memory. Does that make any sense? Where once my mind was a single box that held many memories rubbing shoulders together, it's now a box that holds lot of other boxes, each one containing a memory on its own.
Analogies are seldom perfect, but that's the best I can do with thoughts that are constantly trying to evade me, dodging out of my grasp even as I reach for them. Where once I felt like the same person in every house, I'm now only too well aware that every house only knew me as I was at that time. I was still a child in my last house, and for most of my time there, the nearby streets, fields, and trees were my playground and playthings, but that can't be said for the house I now inhabit. I never played as a kid in the surrounding environs and that's now become a source of disappointment to me. The fact that, when I first moved here, I didn't make any distinction between the kid I'd been and the teenager I'd become no longer seems to matter for some strange reason. To feel like a kid again, I'd have to live in a house I inhabited as a kid, but I know then my teenage memories would seem out of place and out of time, so I'd never be completely satisfied.
Anyway, I trust that all makes some kind of sense to most of you and some of you can perhaps relate to it. I yet feel I haven't done justice to the subject, but maybe I've inched a little closer to the target. If any of you Crivvies ever feel the same, any thoughts, theories, or observations are most welcome. (Even if it's just to say you don't know what I'm on about - or on.)
