My Legendary Girlfriend

Reading - My Legendary Girlfriend by Mike Gayle.

I don't seem to find the time to read much these days. There's always something else which has to be done - work, sleep, tidying up, surfing the web.. contemporary fiction gets pushed the bottom of my 'to-do' list - weekends are just too short, other things take priority. But hey, here's a four-day bank holiday weekend, and since I've wussed out of climbing Snowdon, there's nothing "better" which has to be done for once, so I can guiltlessly relax and read some new novels.

I like contemporary fiction - the more contemporary, the better. I enjoy reading references to bands I listen to, pubs I drink in, shops I visit, towns I know, etc etc. Maybe this just highlights how self-obsessed I am - the more I can identify with a book, the more I enjoy reading it. Is that normal?

Later, I happened upon a few old floppy disks, containing ASCII files from my Amiga days. Mostly letters that I'd sent to people between 1992 and 1996, ie when I was about 16 to 20 years old. Quite revelatory, reading through them now. Funny how much you can change in five years - how much university changes you. I don't really recognise the person I was, but some of the references to events, and parties, and nights out sparked a few happy memories. It's weird how much you forget - or how much you choose to forget.

This is one of my concerns about keeping an online journal - that people will dive straight to the entries from last year and assume they're written by the same person who's writing this, which of course they are in one sense, but I've also moved on since then. Files on a server might remain the same for months on end, but I sure don't.

Anyway, it was interesting, reading things I'd written during my school days, seeing life as I saw it then, reminiscing about the people I knew, and still know, and how they too have changed. Perhaps I'll publish some of the letters (or edited versions thereof) on this site, for the record, to give a fuller picture of how I've evolved (or not?) over the years. Now, how's that for navel-gazing?