Results day

I'm reminded that it's A-level results day by a flurry of excited tweets, retweeted by my old college QMU in London.
"Anyone studying English/Drama at Queen Mary's? #qmul" asks @pipson_
Crikey, she's looking for friends already! No need to hang around until Freshers Week these days to 'FAF' - apparently it means Find a Friend. Who knew!
It's yet another sign of how things have changed - cue Hovis theme - since I was a student. Although with the Corbynites in the ascendancy, there's a feeling of deja vu all over again.
When I got my results back in the day, sexy A-levels weren't even a thing. Quite a few of my mates did really badly to the extent that one of them was so distracted by the thought of a future flipping burgers that he crashed his car on the way back from school. He had three other school friends as passengers at the time, and luckily they were all okay, although there was a bit of explaining to do to his mum whose car it was.
I think that they all spent the rest of the afternoon phoning round clearing to see what was on offer - plus ca change. They were recovered enough later to be at our local watering hole to drink away their sorrows.
It was a funny old day, and an odd summer because it marked the start of the end of a lot of school friendships. By September, people had drifted off to their respective universities, colleges and polys (remember them?) and although the bonds of friendship reformed when we regathered in our home town for holidays, they were never quite the same. New friends, new experiences and new horizons ensured that.
As I sit here typing, it's actually closer in time to my own kids possibly picking up their A-level results, or whatever may replace them, than it is to when I picked up mine. That's quite a scary thought - don't start me on grants, housing benefit and student politics of the 80s. It seems a long time ago, and yet still so fresh.
Incidentally, the car crasher went on to study marine biology and works in a highly paid oil industry job I believe. By contrast I did alright in my A-levels, and am churning out copy for chump change.
There's a lesson there.

Picture this

Eighties style: it's in there somewhere

We live in a world where images have lost some of their power or allure. The fact that most of us carry a camera around with at all times means there are not many things that remain undocumented or shared.

Of course it wasn't always like this (cue Hovis theme tune). When I was younger, cameras were not generally carried around. Unless you saw yourself as a photographer and were always on the lookout for a shot, people only took cameras out on certain occasions: holidays, parties, school trips, weddings, Christmas...

The list is not exhaustive, but the point is that we only tended to document things that we thought were special and required recording for posterity. You can see it in the studied grins and stiffness in many old pictures. You really did pose for pictures. There were only 24 or 36 shots in a reel and you didn't want to waste them by not being camera ready. When the film was eventually finished, which could take months, or even years in some cases, you then had to send off the film and wait for Truprint or whoever to return it 28 days later.

As a result, I find that there are large parts of my life where there aren't many pictures of me. My university years for example. It really wasn't like today were we can shoot off that many pictures of one scene, choose the best one and delete the rest. The few pictures I have are a bit stagy with me and my peers trying to look cool, or wacky, or a combination of the two.

That's why I like this picture, which until last night I didn't know existed. I was browsing Facebook where a band I saw quite a lot in the Eighties, The Very Things, had posted some pictures from back in the day. I was scrolling through them when this one jumped out. That's me in the middle with the rather wavy, Charles I do (I thought I looked like Bono at the time). It was taken from the stage at one of their gigs at ULU in London. I think I must have been about 19 or 20. Standing next to me with his hand making a fin in front of his face, is my friend Andrew.

There are several reasons I like the picture. It captures a time an a place that I remember very fondly. It was my first real taste of independence, living away from home and left to my own devices. I thought I was kind of out there, but looking back on it, I probably had, as David Cameron would put it a normal student experience. There were some high jinks, but in some ways we were fairly innocent, and I think that it comes through in the picture. We weren't particularly cool, although we thought we were. Our pleasures were fairly simple and we had a good time.

In some ways we had it a lot easier than students today. I can't remember there being a whole lot of pressure on me to achieve highly at university. In some ways I wish there had been. College was seen as a bit of a lesson in life, certainly that was a message I carried from my very liberal social studies lecturer at school, but it was a fairly common thought. You could live reasonably well on a student grant (just starting to become means tested as I went to college although I got a full grant for three years), tuition fees were paid, banks were happy to indulge an overdraft if required (some things never change), but you could get housing benefit and claim dole in the summer.

I wonder how many of the people in that picture ended up working in the City or in corporate law or accountancy. Not very many I guess, although most of them are students. Did many of them have a plan? I certainly didn't, and I didn't really have much of a clue either. But by the look of my face in that picture, I was happy enough that night.

The last post

Remember these?

I was clearing out a drawer at the weekend and found a sheet of unused stamps from the Christmas before last. My first thought was to wonder whether they can still be used since they were bought at one price and second class postage has since increased in price. It seems that they are, and an inflation busting investment at that. Second class remains second class no matter what you originally paid for it.
My next consideration is more problematic. When am I going to use them?
Stamps used to be an essential component of a well run household. You needed them on hand for birthday cards, thank you notes, letters and for paying bills.
You could even, as David Brent pointed out, use them as legal tender. I did this a few times myself in my teens before I had a bank account, sending off for badges of bands I liked through dodgy small ads in the back of Sounds magazine. You could get a postal order, but they seemed a bit more faffy, and I didn't want to ask my mum to write me a cheque as she'd inevitably want to know why I wanted a large embroidered patch with 'Black Sabbath: Heaven and Hell' on it anyway.
I had money, thanks to my paper round, but no means to spending it beyond face to face transactions in my immediate vicinity. Stamps did the trick. They were almost like a precursor to Paypal, enabling micropayments for the financially disenfranchised.
When I went to university, stamps became an even more important currency, enabling communication with my mates who had been scattered to the four corners of the UK.
I don't think I've ever written as much as I did in my first year at college. Despite making new friendships, I missed my old buddies and longed to stay in contact with them, and to share some of my crazy and delinquent goings on with them.
Looking back, I think I was quite lonely, even as I seemed to have an active social life. But the initial friendships I made were fairly shallow and it's telling that only a few college friendships have really stood the test of time (hello Andrew, hello Mark).
So I reached out towards the people I'd known from my teens. I think a lot of them felt the same given the tone and the frequency of the correspondence from them.
Letter writing became quite addictive once you realised that when you shared your feelings with someone you would get a response in kind, a few days later, or maybe after a few weeks depending on the diligence of your correspondent.
Like so much of the near past, it almost seems like another age now. Nobody I knew had a phone in their student digs, let alone a mobile. There were about 20 computers in the whole of my department and none of them were hooked up to any sort of information superhighway that we could access - this was 1985. Crikey, it seems so near, yet so far away in many ways.
Communication came in three modes:
* a personal visit. (Either back home to your parents for a feed, a delousing and a machine wash of your humming clothes pile. Or a visit to another student friend which would inevitably be a massive piss up that would carry through into a several days to shift hangover.)
* a reverse the charges phone call. (These could be sporadic. I remember one time my mum had to send a letter to find out if I was still alive, it was so long since she had heard from me. Another time I stood in a phone box for about five minutes failing to remember my own home phone number, which is still one of only a handful I can remember.)
* a letter.
The latter was the most popular because it was the cheapest. Especially if you put sellotape over the stamp making it impossible to frank properly. The resulting stamp could then ping pong back and forwards between correspondents until such time as it became indistinguishable.
I well remember the thrill of finding a letter, or even two or three in my postbox at halls of residence. You could never expect the immediate response of today's email, text or instant messaging conversations, and it was all the sweeter for it.
Waiting was part of the thrill.
It wasn't just the fact of receiving a letter. The content was often pages and pages of funny, heart rending, satirical, annoying and surreal stuff. The kind that you can only really write when you are in your late teens.
I still have a bag full of letters from friends, and one in particular (hello Trevor, wherever you are) who was as verbose and as prolific as I was. They read like strange, one-sided conversations where the points in your previous letter are replied to sandwiched between flights of fantasy, and the latest tales and triumphs, real or imagined, .
It's such powerful stuff that I don't look at them very often. It's probably mainly rubbish and I don't especially want to tarnish the memory of what it was like by reading between the lines.
Letter writing continued for a good few years after university. Friends were still fairly dispersed. None of us were that well off, so often didn't have phones, or didn't want to run up big bills. People went travelling and writing remained an important connection to friends and family.
Do young people still write?
I'm sure they must, although they don't need to in the way we did.
My son, who is five, is starting to become quite the scribe. As his language improves he is discovering the joy of putting his thoughts down on a piece of paper. He can make people laugh, puzzle them, and make them like him. Powerful stuff.
Will he be doing it in his teens and twenties? I doubt it actually. And even if he is, I don't think it will have quite the same effect on him as it did on my generation because there probably won't 't be many elements of the message that haven't already been leaked to him across the other media platforms that he will undoubtedly use.
But times change and I don't doubt that his generation's form of communication will be every bit as compelling to him as mine was to me.
They'll probably write about many of the same things: loves and hates; friends and foes, hopes and dreams.
Some things don't change.
Now, who wants a handwritten letter?