The title of this blog isn’t just for show, y’know. I archive everything. It’s… not a million miles away from hoarding, in all honesty, I just try to be careful about it. Anyone who has literal OCD will know the deal there… anyway. Today I finished scanning in every! single! picture! I know exists of my childhood, and I’ve realised that as a teenager I experienced quite a few events that turned out quite formative and nothing was ever photographed of them. My parents were big into analog cameras, but when they went obsolete and digital cameras replaced them it was a totally different story.
I remember for example that in 2005 I went to see Green Day with a friend (who’s still one of my closest friends in fact!) at the Milton Keynes Bowl. I think that was the first time I’d been to a concert without adult supervision. I did go see The Monkees when I was a very young child, that’s one of the things which triggered my lifelong Monkees fandom. But this Green Day concert, everyone in school was talking about it and I wanted to go so badly! So I managed to grab some tickets off of Ebay and hell yeah, I got to go. I can still remember it, it was a fantastic experience. To this day Billie Joe Armstrong is the most electrifying person I’ve seen on stage. And yet… I have so little evidence, for lack of a better word, that I was even there! No photos, no ticket stubs, nothing. I do have this entry in my journal:
Which is a valuable thing to have! But I do wish I had photos. We live in such a photo-heavy society now, I guess, and it’s so weird to have whole years where there just… weren’t many. That same year, in the same town, I went to a convention with the same friend and all photos of that are lost too. I know they existed once, because I actually wrote an entry about it way back then!
But as you can see, all broken links now, and I have absolutely no memory of it whatsoever except that Chris Barrie was nice. My very unreliable memory is, I think, probably the main reason I desperately wish I had more photographs of my life in 2005. It was, according to the diary referred to up there, a pretty difficult and depressing year in many ways. I once saw someone call photographs “memory receipts” and man, I’d really have liked some good receipts of all that.
Kids who have no doubt seen the faces adults make upon seeing teenagers whip out a smartphone, please take as many selfies as humanly possible and upload them to all your social medias. You’ll be grateful you did, I promise.
Really I should never have encountered The Monkees at all. Not only was I not born in 1966, my mum was around six years old and thus not really in a position to appreciate music. But thanks to the show being rerun on British television I gained a favourite band for life! Thank you, Monkees. And thank you mum, for taking me to a Monkees concert when I was about seven and not minding that I got overwhelmed and threw up friggin’ everywhere.
