Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Perfidious Nostalgia
I used to read my abridged Tom Sawyer in bed, in the box room of our house near Skelmorlie. We were two thirds of the way between Largs – famous for birthday knickerbocker glories at Nardinis – and Skelmorlie – famous for nothing but deserving renown for its library: they had every Asterix, but they were kept under the counter, available only on request, subject to long waiting lists. Sometimes I heard the throb of the nine o’clock news and wondered how I’d ever stayed up so late. Would my body still work in the morning? A creak on the stairs and I’d hit the off switch of the lamp which sat, germinating me, on the floor beside my bed. A flush, some steps, and I’d escaped capture. Back to life on the Mississippi.
I moved rooms. I was now above the kitchen, a wooden stair climbing to my lair – why not a rope ladder? I never could understand my parents’ refusal of the piratical. The box room became a study for my Dad. He didn’t use the laser there - that was beforehand, in Bicester - but it was here that we evaluated our experiment. A break from his Open University degree; we would be scientists together. We measured limpet shells. We went to Meigle beach; we found the shells and we measured them, with 30cm ruler and builder’s tape. I read the results and Dad entered them into the primitive spreadsheet laid out on the Acorn Electron. We would do it the next year, and the next after that, we would see if anything was changing. The endeavour was never repeated. Perhaps the move to Weston-Super-Mare came that soon; perhaps we forgot. We still collected sea anemone shells.
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I used to read my abridged Tom Sawyer in bed, in the box room of our house near Skelmorlie. We were two thirds of the way between Largs – famous for birthday knickerbocker glories at Nardinis – and Skelmorlie – famous for nothing but deserving renown for its library: they had every Asterix, but they were kept under the counter, available only on request, subject to long waiting lists. Sometimes I heard the throb of the nine o’clock news and wondered how I’d ever stayed up so late. Would my body still work in the morning? A creak on the stairs and I’d hit the off switch of the lamp which sat, germinating me, on the floor beside my bed. A flush, some steps, and I’d escaped capture. Back to life on the Mississippi.
I moved rooms. I was now above the kitchen, a wooden stair climbing to my lair – why not a rope ladder? I never could understand my parents’ refusal of the piratical. The box room became a study for my Dad. He didn’t use the laser there - that was beforehand, in Bicester - but it was here that we evaluated our experiment. A break from his Open University degree; we would be scientists together. We measured limpet shells. We went to Meigle beach; we found the shells and we measured them, with 30cm ruler and builder’s tape. I read the results and Dad entered them into the primitive spreadsheet laid out on the Acorn Electron. We would do it the next year, and the next after that, we would see if anything was changing. The endeavour was never repeated. Perhaps the move to Weston-Super-Mare came that soon; perhaps we forgot. We still collected sea anemone shells.
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