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18th May, 2022
Growing up, I exhibited what I've come to describe as "searching behaviour". I'm not sure if there is another term for it in the sphere of psychiatric or psychological research, or if it's even a thing for that matter, but I was always looking for something. It just seemed important to me to have a purpose; that I was here for a reason, that I was meant to be doing something. I just had to find out what it was and I would be complete.
At thirteen or fourteen I decided that it was music. I'd always had an ear and had played keys since I was young. I could listen to any song and play it. Consequently I never learned to read music. Didn't need to.
So one day I came home from school, and to my surprise my older brother had cycled into Town (we lived eight miles away) and bought a 3/4 size acoustic guitar. (I may have indicated at one point in time that I could, in fact, already play. I couldn't.) Cue his surprise when he handed it over, looking expectantly at me:
"Go on, play something you bell-end..."
I just about managed to strangle out a single-string rendition of the riff from Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple.
Yup, a real damp squib moment.
Anyway, at some point after this I stole some chord books from the school music department (Learn to Play! Oasis) which had all their hits, along with the chords. There was another one, but I can't for the life of me remember - might have been Learn to Play! Stereophonics. Well, I did eventually "Learn to Play" from those first books. I say eventually because it took me six months to figure out how to tune the guitar. My first attempt saw me dusting off an old Yamaha keyboard I had around, finding an "E" and tuning the guitar based on that. The only problem was I was an octave higher than I should have been on that first note, and by the time I'd cranked up the "B" string the bridge of the guitar gave way. I'd popped the retaining glue! It hadn't come away completely, though. It was damaged, sure. But still playable, with care.
For the next few years I was the only guy in school that had an acoustic with a whammy bar!
Around this same sort of age I'd gotten a book from the local library all about Astronomy. This sparked an enduring interest in space, and at some point I decided that this, now, was my thing. The reason I was here. My purpose.
So, naturally, I set about immersing myself in it. I wrote pages and pages in my notebook, all about the history of it all; Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, Newton, Herschel, Hawking. I'd saved up money from my paper round, around £45, and my Dad had fronted the other £45 and we'd gone out and bought a cheap Tasco telescope. My interest in space had emerged at a convenient time: Comet Hale-Bob was due to make an appearance in April of that year.
It was a great time. I think at one point I was even seriously making plans to go to NASA's Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. I remember coming home from school and seeing a big white padded envelope with the infamous NASA seal on it. NASA had mailed me?! Incredible. What must the postman have thought!
Fast-forward to today. I still play guitar, almost daily. I still have the framed pictures on my wall of the Andromeda galaxy, the Pleiades star cluster, an image collage from the Voyager encounter at Saturn, all taken into Town to be framed when I was sixteen. I've moved around a lot in that time. Different houses, different cities. Same pictures.
It's not the inanimate objects we cling to, it's what they represent: The life we once knew, the people we once were. Those pictures represent a moment in time, a snapshot. I think it's good to have that reminder, to carry it always.
Y'know, I've had a theory for some time that we exist in every possible stage of life simultaneously at the same time, maybe in some higher dimensional reality. We appear to move in a linear direction, experiencing existence one chunk at a time. But what if that's just a matter of perception? If Time is a fourth-dimensional construct, what would fifth-dimensional beings see when they look at us? The baby, the boy, the man and the ghost, all at once?
Well, that's an idea for another time!