Retrospective

It's one of those times when, for whatever reason, I stop and look backwards rather than forwards, and feel pleasantly surprised by how much time has passed since such-and-such an event. Probably these retrospective glances should take place at the end of the year (or the beginning of the new year) but it usually takes me a couple of months to find my feet in a new year, since they're always a bit mad and busy to begin with.

As it turns out, this year is full of convenient anniversaries. At the end of this month it'll be ten years since I first kissed the man I would eventually marry (I then panicked and hid in the toilets for half an hour, but that's maybe a story for another time). Looking back further, it's twenty years since Therapy? released their album Troublegum, which became the soundtrack to my teenage years. It's still arguably one of the finest albums of all time, imo, and it's getting a shiny rerelease this year, which makes me exceptionally happy.

It's also twenty years since I decided I wanted to be a writer.

14 year old Rakie wanted to be a staff writer on a computer games magazine. I had a moderate obsession with a certain gaming magazine, and a teenage crush on one of its staff writers. (By an odd coincidence, I recently found out that my sister's friend now works with my teenage crush-object on a different magazine, so she at least is fulfilling that childhood dream even if I'm not.) If I couldn't work for a magazine, I wanted to be a screenwriter. That one was Tarantino's fault. So I started writing.

It goes without saying that all my early stories and screenplays were awful. I'm happy to report that none of them survive to this day (that I know of), except as fragments in my head that might one day find their way into a completely different story.

Twenty years on and I'm still listening to the same music, reading computer game blogs (so much cheaper and more environmentally friendly than magazines), shouting at Tarantino for being better than me, and writing. Although a lot has changed in those intervening years, those fundamental things haven't, and I sincerely hope they don't. In another twenty years I'd like to be a better writer, with the same backdated taste in movies, music and computer games.