Archive for the 'time travel' Category

I just got your message baby…

June 8, 2007

Recently some of my chunked up time has been spent in the 1980′s. Not literal time travel of course, although that idea does appeal. Ian R Macleod has a wonderful story called Marnie where the protagonist repeatedly goes back in time to prevent a terrible personal tragedy – in it there is a moment when the traveller wakes up and through inference – feeling the subtle changes as he awakes, he realises that he is somewhere in the past. I always wondered what that would be like – if I woke in 1996 would it feel instantly different or would I have to go further back to get that instant dislocation..the fizz and the fizzle and pop of arrival. the 1980′s maybe – the air kinda of all plasticy broken up with the a nylon like static. And what would waking up in medieval times be like – I have always loved the phrase the ‘ the air was medieval’ but have neither found a use for it nor really understand what it could mean.

My own time travel back to the 80′s  has come through reading The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst a book so beautifully written  that you can’t help but read an enormous message into the whole thing – when it might quite well mean very little at all, just lots of lovely words. So humour me while I continue – to me it was about a lot of things, Class, Money, Greed, Drugs, Other, people’s family but two things loomed rather larger than others – Being Gay and Aids.

Now the Gay part I don’t think was done too well. I am straight myself just like I am English and Tall, and Blue eyed- all accidental a product of circumstances or genes – nothing to be ashamed of nor nothing to be really proud off either. Not down to me.

But I should suppose that being Gay would be more exciting than this – more a great big jumping off – more the moment hanging  in the air, more a great big blue thumprint over the world -more well more more, colours and lights and noise and more than I could ever imagine, something else.

But what was  more interesting for me was how it talked about  AIDS .

For me Aids has always been something that has happened somewhere else.  (Now I guess your opinion of me has lowered even more than before), but let me explain growing up in the 80′s it seemed just like another way of hammering us down – along with the impending Nuclear War,  Mass Unemployment and Spandau Ballet. I remember one TV discussion telling us that at least a third of all our friends would have AIDS by 1992.  It’s a bit like today ; global warming,  the war on terror, the pensions crisis – all the things that never happen.

But what I learnt from the Line of Beauty was that these things did happen and they happened here. In the 1980′s a quiet plague – an unspoken holculaust wiped out a generation of gay men in the UK. And I never knew it happened..I must be dumb even some of my favourite songs told me so :

The Pet Shop Boys in Being Boring spoke of :

“All the people I was kissing
Some are here and some are missing”
 

Kitchen of Distinction a great lost band in Prize spoke of “The pub is burning down”.

I just didn’t get it at the time.  But now because of a book, my perspective has changed which is no bad thing at all.

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