NOW – 28/8/06

It’s been more difficult than I thought it would be to complete this collection of stories from the summer of 1995. In fact, if truth may be told, I’d already pretty much given up on finishing it, and moved on to start writing stuff that will eventually end up as part of the fourth and final Four Summers chapter. Like the first and second chapters in this tetralogy, this last story has a distinct beginning, middle, and end, something which the current one doesn’t really seem to have. Also, it’s been in my thoughts a lot over this summer, so much so that I’ve simply had to start writing bits of it, which has naturally been to the detriment of this story. Factor in my laziness when it comes to writing in general, let alone finishing things off, and it all adds up to me deciding to leave the story to end where it had come to a standstill.

However, after some reflection, mainly prompted by my friend Ian, I find I can’t let the tale of 1995 end the way it would have done if I’d left it as it was at the conclusion of the last episode. It needs just a little more, a bit more story and a bit of closure, before we can move the story on a few years. So for those who have expressed an interest in the sad tale that begins the story of the summer of 2001, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a little longer. Now, we’re going back a lot further in time, to a much happier period of my life – and we’re invited to a party.

THEN – 2/8/95

It was inevitable that we would hold a party at 19 Burton Street that summer. It was a big house, we knew a lot of people, and, let’s be fair, we were young and loved a great party, particularly if it involved drinking, music, and girls. And this party had all of these in spades.

The best bit, for me, was – and I know how crap this sounds now – a kiss with Laura, a girl whom I fancied quite a bit during the long summer. Not the only girl, I have to admit, that I was interested in. I was a self-styled romantic hobo in those days – or to put it more bluntly, I was a wannabe slag who didn’t know what he wanted, and fancied pretty much anything in a skirt. Of course, I couldn’t see it, back then. If getting older has given me one thing, it’s the gift of perception, particularly where myself is concerned, and even more specifically, myself as I was back in the last days of my teenage-dom. Did I just want to be loved? Or shagged? Or kissed? Or did I just want somebody to want me, because it gave me more of a grasp on reality, on feeling somehow more real, if somebody else of flesh and blood found me as interesting as I did? It’s a combination of all of these things, and it was never stronger than back then.

Even worse, the previous evening, Steve made a list of all the girls who were coming to the party, and gave odds as to whom I was most likely to get off with! I was as much a party to this blatant sexism as he was, and while it’s a bit sad to recall it now, I can’t quite find it within myself to apologise for it, because something so ridiculous, yet amusing, is so much a part of how things were back then. The odds of getting off with Laura were, in case you’re interested, five to one, in from an opening price of sevens.

But one kiss doesn’t make a party, and there was so much else going on and so many more people there. In fact the only notable absentees from our large and extended family of friends and acquaintances were Kate and her sister Jess, who were still on holiday with their parents, and for some reason that is lost to time, Kim and Phil. Actually, I can’t be sure that Beth was there either, although she had returned from her holiday with Anthony Stanley the previous day. Perhaps she stayed with her parents to escape the noise and chaos of the gathering, I really can’t remember. However, they were the only ones who weren’t there – Alex was there, of course, as was Ian, along with his sister Becky, and her friends Sandy, Janine, and Rachel. There was Eddie, Danny, and Vicci, Luke and Charlotte, whom you may recall we had seen briefly at Glastonbury a month or so earlier. Dan Foley, who had briefly been the bass player in my band with Keir, was also there, and he got off with Anna Crawford, who was present with her friends Kerrie, Celia, and Anna. Madeleine and her friend Mina also turned up, and got so drunk that they both passed out, the latter lying on the bathroom floor in a haze of alcohol fumes and a smell of sick.

They weren’t the only alcohol casualties, of course – in fact, a stupendous amount of booze was drunk by almost all the guests, although admittedly some was drunk by a few uninvited wankers, who had clearly turned up after hearing about the party on the grapevine. It’s even possible that Steve or I had invited them ourselves during moments of drunken madness earlier in the week. Like our later, and perhaps greater New Year’s Eve party, we had very little control over who came and went and in many ways we were lucky that nothing ever got stolen, although I do from time to time wonder whatever happened to my twelve inch copy of "Stay Beautiful" by Manic Street Preachers – maybe it was one of these occasions that saw it disappear from my collection? It wasn’t of great financial value, but it sure as hell was important to me. Come to think of it, I never saw my tape of "Life" by Inspiral Carpets again, either. I’ve reclaimed them in later years, thanks to eBay, so it probably isn’t worth dwelling on these negatives, particularly as they may not even have disappeared that night.

Thankfully, the wankers who weren’t on the guest list themselves disappeared after not too long, and the party wound pleasantly into the small hours. We drank, we laughed, Ian and Becky and I sang and played a few tunes, and everybody had a great time. The house took something of a battering – there was mess absolutely everywhere, cans, bottles, fag ends, fag ash, fag packets, broken glass, and… custard creams. Yes, some packets of that perennially popular biscuit had been opened, and liberally distributed around my flat, and the hall. There were many trampled into the carpet, and for weeks afterwards, we would discover one hiding somewhere, and then a few days would pass and we’d find another.

Down the back of sofas, on the top of cupboards, behind shelves, we’d look and there would be another bloody custard cream there – I swear they were breeding.

Every biscuit was a little reminder of the great Burton Street party, which even though it came just two days into August was the high water mark of that summer - each day afterwards moved us a little closer to autumn, and more changes to come, yet somehow I don’t think that we thought of things that way. We used to discuss our lives in terms of eras, or periods, even as they were happening, and I don’t think that what we were chronicling in our diaries, and our inner mental autobiographies as "summer 1995" had come to an end for any of us, because we were doing the same old things, seeing the same old people, and having the same old fun as before the day of the party.

and I wonder now if somehow we knew that what would be historically chronicled in our inner biographies as "summer 1995" had started to fade, or change into something new, even though, for a while, we did the same old things, saw the same old people, and had the same old fun as before.

However, a week or so after the party, I wrote this:

Dying yellow grass at the roadside

Leaves cast adrift from swaying trees
Shaken by the last of the summer breeze
The world changes with the season

Do you remember our better days,
Of happiness created a thousand ways?

Lazy afternoons under quiet skies
We talked and laughed, made a million plans
Looking forward from the day it began
Red sunsets in the cool evening air
Then into the unknown; midnight driving
Too far, too fast, but always surviving

We woke up smiling at the end of the dream
Still drunk from yesterday’s last night
Memories captured in this morning’s light

The magic we evoked seemed endless
But did you think it would stay the same,
That it wouldn’t drown as tears in the autumn rain?"

The melancholy of the poem (or is it a song?) surprises me now, particularly as at the time, I don’t recall feeling particularly sad or regretful, or even consciously aware of time passing, and changing. As I said earlier, things seemed to be just the same. In fact, there are hundreds of other short stories from the rest of the summer: I briefly went out with Jess, Kate and Alex’s sister, but I ended it all rather poorly and generally behaved badly. I also got off with Becky, Ian’s sister, at Echoes whilst incredibly drunk, and felt terrible the day after, although this was just the start of another, very different story. There were more parties, including one at Kim’s, one at Laura’s, and two at Burton Street. The first was quite mediocre and unmemorable while the second, organised by Beth, was a bit of a nightmare as Liz turned up and got into a screaming row with Steve. The Britpop battle between Oasis and Blur was gathering steam, and Alex and I had a five pound bet with each other on whether "Roll With It" or "Country House" would reach number one, a bet that I lost and don’t ever recall actually paying up for… sorry, mate.

Beth eventually moved out in preparation for going to University in Liverpool, and Kim and Phil moved into her room, while Simon’s presence was barely felt in the house at all. Alex and Kate’s family bought a cat. The A Level and BTEC results came and went, with Laura, Kate, et al having done particularly poorly in their theatre courses, leaving much bile to be venomously spewn by everyone at Lindsay Ross, whom everyone believed had deliberately marked practical elements of the course poorly for people she didn’t like. This was never conclusively proven, and fortunately everyone who wanted to go to university or college managed to do so. Steve, Alex, Kate, Jess, Kim, Phil, and I took a trip to Rutland Water one night in the pissing rain, a journey on which we listened to the Manics’ "Holy Bible" album, and had car trouble near Melton which required us to stop on some hilly road to sort it out. For some reason, this trip is one of my strongest memories of the summer, even though in its dark, rainy and moody way, it’s atypical of the period as a whole.

Steve went to France to a family wedding, and in his absence the rest of us went to a party to celebrate the birthday of Zanda Bailey, a distant acquaintance – we stayed there for nine minutes. On another night during Steve’s time away, we were in the pub well past closing time as a Frank Bruno fight was on, and they kept serving, allowing myself, Ian, Becky, and Janine to reminisce fondly about long ago children’s television programmes and their theme tunes. Another night later that month saw us back at Burleigh Community College to see Byact, the theatre group with whom Ian and I had been to Edinburgh the previous year, perform their 1995 piece, a dreadfully pretentious and incomprehensible piece entitled "Waterfront Wasteland / Medea Material /Landscape With Argonauts".

By then, August had given way to September, and by this time, summer had become Indian summer. Ian went back to University, although not before we recorded our "affectionate" Doctor Who piss-take based on "The Trial of a Time Lord". Alex moved out to join Steve, Kim, Phil and I at Burton Street, and then finally, Alex and I bade farewell to our tumultuous teens and turned twenty – included in my presents were a pet rat called Daisy from Steve, and inexplicably, a copy of female soft-core porn mag "For Women" from Kim. Those, my friends, were the days.

THEN AND NOW - An epilogue of youth

And that was it - the end of the last summer of youth and freedom.

Every single summer since has been spent working, and in the long and endless routine of work and being an adult, and all the triumph and tragedy that comes with it, the past has long since disappeared over the horizon into the blurry land of contradictory memories and photographs that don’t tell the stories they were meant to. It’s impossible when one arrives in the terrible never-land of being old to truly remember what it was really like back then, the long days of reading, writing, playing on the computer, singing and gambling, and the crazed nights of drinking too heavily, smoking too much, falling in and out of love too often, driving too fast, staying up too late, daring to hold impossible dreams in our arms, and keeping some kind of twisted nobility and dirty humour to every moment, behaving as if our lives were an exciting story that was on the edge of exploding into celebrity, fame and fortune, and simultaneously on the verge of a total collapse into failure, darkness, and despair.

We nearly made it, but we nearly failed completely. We had our seconds in the sunshine, and some time in the darkness too. But in those impetuous, arrogant, days, there were moments when I felt in complete control of my destiny, that everything and anything I wanted was within my grasp, and there was an amazing sense of energy about life. These feelings were the last vestige, I think, of the incredible power of being young, and they had hung around just long enough to give me up to the age of twenty, and maybe a few months beyond that, to feel utterly alive, for better or worse, and all the exhilaration and horror that comes with blood pumping through your veins and fire bursting from your soul. Then, while my back was turned, it disappeared. I didn’t even notice it go, but somehow I had become an adult, and that dying flame of youth that had once seemed set to burn bright and strong forever had flickered, and finally gone out.

Now, all I can do is re-read the old diaries, look at the old photographs, listen to the music, and try and think the same thoughts, but it never quite works. Even going out with old friends for drinks and chatter and laughter, as I frequently do, has a different resonance to it, albeit a very pleasant one. I’ve become a different person in the interim decade since the summer of 1995 burnt itself out, in some ways for the better admittedly, but I’ve lost a great part of myself that can never, ever be regained, and for that reason and a million more I’ll always come back to those good, bad, old days when life has become boring, or painful, or too much to bear, because back then, life was frequently bad, but sometimes, it was so good, so damn live-able, that it’s difficult to believe it ever really happened. But it did. It all did. It’s all true.

"All I can say, is I miss those days."

Ian Broudie, "Thinking Up, Looking Down"

Back at the start of this chapter, I wrote this:

"It’s January 2006 as I write this, and I’ve fallen in love again. A bit. Maybe more. Maybe it’s not love. Maybe I just fancy somebody, really fancy somebody, and I felt that I had to use the word ‘love’ to do it the justice that ‘fancying’ doesn’t. I don’t know. It’s like being young and old and happy and sad and full of expectation and disappointment all at once. It’s something I haven’t felt in this way for a while, a long while, and it’ll come to nothing or last forever or peter out somewhere in-between. It’s ridiculous and terrible, and utterly, utterly fantastic."

Well, it’s August 2006 as I write this, and like all the dreams of the old days, this vision of love sadly did come to precisely nothing. But just having the feeling was fun while it lasted, and maybe that’s the greatest lesson of all that the summer of 1995, the last great days of my youth that they were, has tried to teach me – hold on tight to what you’ve got now, because at any second it can be snatched away, leaving you with nothing but fading memories and a big hole where your life was.

I wish I could say I’d learned that lesson, but… well, maybe one day I will. Maybe.