2005_09_01_archive

Nostalgia: Making the present look crap.

Last night I went to meet my friend Jenny, who is my best friend. I

met Jenny through an orchestra in which we both used to play the cello

from the age of maybe 13 to 15. Maybe younger than that.

Every Monday night we used to grudgingly go along the music school,

sit wearily upon the hard plastic chairs and shiver through an hour

and a half of various bits of Mozart, Bach, Brahms and the rest of the

crew.

To shake things up a bit we would sometimes try to subtley de-tune our

cellos so that we could have to waste a bit of time tuning them,

shaking our heads in badly-faked exasperation. Other times, when the

going became particularly tough or we had been told off for talking

for the fiftieth time in the last ten minutes, we would play the whole

piece on open strings, without putting our fingers on any notes. With

a ten people-string cello section it wasn't that obvious what we were

doing, it just kind of subtley making things sound all wrong.

I know, I know, rebellious. Rock and ROLL.

So Jenny and I have been good friends since the old days of Monday

night orchestrations, and then we went travelling together before we

parted ways to go to different universities. She went off to

Nottingham and I went to Warwick.

I treasure the memories of travelling with my Jen. Sometimes when we

meet up we get out those memories and unwrap them, telling each other

stories we both already know, recalling people we met and loved,

places we stayed.

Last night we did that.

We remembered my nineteenth birthday, spent in a banana factory on the

East coast of Australia in a place called Tully. We started work at

6am, and stood in 2 inches of water in a production line in the huge

fluorescently lit factory, packing bananas in boxes until 4pm. With

two fifteen minute breaks. In the whole day. That's a LOT of banana

packing. Jenny was standing behind me, and we spent the whole day

telling each other variations on the following joke:

What do you call a really cunning popstar?

Wiley Minogue.

Variations can be, for example, What do you call a popstar that floats

on the surface of water? Bobby Williams. Or What do you call a popstar

who has to shave their whole body every day? Mariah Hairy.

You get the picture. I didn't say they were good jokes.

We remembered the time I fell off my moped in the Cook Islands and

spent an hour taking photos of a really insignificant looking crab

because (as it later transpired) I was in shock.

Also the time we watched a lightning storm whilst camping in Kakadu

National Park in the Northern Territory, and stood in awe as the

raggedy streaks lit up the sky like a network of luminous veins from

horizon to horizon.

Climbing in Thailand, sky-diving in New Zealand, diving in Cairns.

The people we wanted to be, the people we secretly fell in love with,

the people whose necks we would have cheerfully wrung.

The time I got sunburnt so badly that I had blisters all over my back

and arms for two weeks, making putting my rucksack on impossible.

Jenny's run in with bedbugs, resulting in five pence piece-sized bites

agonizingly erupting all over her legs. Sunbathing topless for the

first time. Getting our noses pierced together. Not, like, pierced

together so that we were joined at the nose with one bit of metal, no,

I meant at the same time. Then mine being wrong and my nose swelling

up inside and the man having to wrench the piercing out with pliers in

an operation that took twenty minutes of screaming and swearing (me)

and being in danger of testicles being ripped off (him).

We don't always talk about travelling when we get together. We discuss

our career plans, our love situations, our families, our living

situations, everything that best friends talk about. But sometimes we

open the box where we keep our mutual memories and re-live the