Happy Christmas 2008
blogLast night I met up with the members of my old band Rouser. It was the first meetup in eleven years, during which there have been marriages, moves, and not much else. We all look exactly the same, which bodes well for next year’s reunion when we plan to have a band practice; no one has gone to seed and no one appears to find such nostalgia embarrassing. You may remember that I read out my Rouser lyrics at a confessional comedy night, however rather than laughing I spent a lot of time looking on my youthful self with some kind of admiration — how intense and risky he was.
Gi-lo Smith (on the left of the image), our old drummer, was in good form, despite bringing along his wife (perhaps the greatest danger of any subsequent reformation is a Yoko figure). He proffered the theory that when you reach your late twenties you stop wanting to rebel against your teenaged self and revert to how you were then. I vaguely agreed, with the qualification that it was more like an Hegelian triadic. Indeed this year I have synthesized great swathes of the thesis of my youth without ever feeling that what I was doing was regressive.
Now I am lounging around in my Mother’s house, drinking tea and eating toast, anticipating the mayhem that will ensue when we go to see my nephews. It has been an anti-Christmas for me, the whole period has gone by in a flash, during which I have been avoiding the zombies in Argyle Street, which was really intolerable with all the bratwurst and glühwein huts.
I wish a very merry Christmas to all.