Time

Everyone bangs on irritatingly about how quickly time flies. Unfortunately it's hard to get too annoyed by this cliche (or any cliche I suppose) because it is absolutely terrifyingly accurate, albeit overused. It's overused because it's so accurate. As soon as I got to the age of about 11 I started noticing the speed of life because I was at secondary school and for the first time really in my life I had two separate stages of time to differentiate between. So everything that happened at secondary school was suddenly comparable to when I was at primary school. For example, on my first ever residential trip when I was 12 we were in a dorm and would chat about what we did the months before, which was at primary school. And suddenly we could appreciate that tangible time had gone by because we had physically and emotionally moved to another place in life.

The thing that got me thinking about this particularly this time sounds frivolous but is rather poignant for me. Matt Willis posted a tweet saying that today is 7 years since Busted split up. They split up when I had just turned 13 and I had been a fan since I was 10. I was only one a few people I knew who loved them, and I covered all my school books with photos of them. I even had Busted pyjamas. I took great pride in the fact I was into a band who played actual instruments and I secretly loved that all my Black Eyed Peas-listening friends teased me for liking "grunger" music.

The morning that the split was announced was a school day and my dad came into my room quite early. He woke me up and broke the news and I remember just being in denial, telling him he must be wrong and convincing myself of the same. Then I got angry, wondering how they could do this to the fans. Then I got upset and cried most of the day. It was genuinely like the stages of grief, but compressed into 5 minutes.

All day at school people laughed at me and made fun of me and were delighted at how the "grunger" band had broken up.

Anyway, I'm gonna shut up and summarise the point I'm trying to make. The day I just described was 7 years ago. How can something so long ago still be so clear? This demonstrates the speed of life. Life goes so quickly that even something that occurred the best part of a decade ago is still in my mind, as fresh as if it were last month.

I don't know how this works.