Before 1992, when I first got online, this is how friendships worked: You met people at school or locally. You would have a circle and from that circle and from time to time someone would, without fanfare, come to hold the position of “best friend”. It was never a formal appointment, nor was it permanent. When it came time to move house or go to university, you would make solemn vows to stay in touch but the world would turn and you would move on and start again. Over and over people you were close to – close enough to be able to sit beside and watch the sea without feeling the need to speak – would begin to fade from reality to recollection. That sense of loss has inspired some of my favourite fiction from Anthony Powell to George Lucas. For me, in 1992, that changed.
I had bought a computer and a modem and was determined to try the new-fangled “world wide web”. At that point you could learn the whole of HTML in an afternoon. Once connected, I was smitten.
Within 24 hours I had my first online acquaintances. They were called “Cixen”. They, like me, used an internet service provider called Cix. It had a bulletin board that was full of people who could all be categorised as “Men with beards”; “Men with motorcycles” or “Men with beards and Motorcycles”. They met (indeed still meet) annually for a barbecue and to sup real ale. They knew impossible amounts about technology and had opinions about everything and would generate enormous and super-heated threads of messages about things no-one else cared about. The more I read and the more I wrote, the better I got to know these people. Soon enough they were friends. They were a new kind of friend: ones I had never seen or spoken to but whom I felt I knew intimately.
Next I joined an internet mailing list dedicated to my favourite football team. When I travel abroad to watch my team play, I travel in a group of 10 or so all of whom I have met through the internet. This is the great power of the net: You get to try your friends before you buy. By the time you meet face to face you already know each other surprisingly well. There is a good chance you have been brought into contact by a shared passion or world view.
Two nights ago I got an email from a friend I had last seen in 1985. He was heading off, he had told me then, to join the US Marine Corps. I never expected to hear from him again. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, it’s just that I understood you lose contact with friends and I expected him to be one of them. Now he has emailed me from San Antonio where he lives with his second wife and three kids. Last time he saw me I had a duffle coat. This is great news for me because I am terribly nosey (which is why my bloglines is bursting). I enjoy catching up with the story arcs of my long lost friends.
The Essex Boy turned Texan is a delightful reunion but not all reunions are so uncomplicated. For instance, I have recently been in touch with the first person I ever fell in love with.
I was in my early teens. Young teenage boys are, stereotypically, difficult. Looking back at those times (and reading my stomach-churningly self-obsessed diary) I was like a shaken snow globe. My head was full of contradictory notions; jumbled ideas and fragmented emotions all in Brownian motion. Nowadays I have settled – a realisation that is in equal parts a comfort and a sadness.
At that age I was an ardent socialist who worried as much about acne as the global struggle of the working class. This was partly because growing up in Frinton-on-sea you never met any members of the working class. You did, however, get acne. I understood that the workers were oppressed and that things would be better if I were allowed to seize control of the state. That would also have the satisfying side-effect of annoying my dad.
I had some simple, if naive views about the heart. I knew that God made sure that there was one person for everyone. I sat for hours in my bedroom worried that my perfect partner might be somewhere inaccessible like Peru or Manchester. I resolved that I simply would not let myself fall in love.
Then, on a french exchange trip, I met a girl and fell for her - I fell like a piano going down a staircase. Every time I saw her, my chest tightened and my mind-fogged like glass. At first I simply could not work out what was wrong with me. I struggled to get a hold of myself. It was as if some previously unacknowledged part of me had woken up and was wrestling me for the steering wheel.Â
If she talked to me, my thoughts raced. I struggled to think of anything to say simply because I was desperate that whatever I said should be perfect. Since, being a teenage boy, I was convinced that the key to impressing a woman was a keen wit (and wit in the context of my school circle meant a vicious form of sarcasm) almost everything I said was a convoluted spatter of barbed nonsense. I felt like a hypnotist’s stooge – forced by an external will to act like an imbecile. Why, for instance, did I walk down the coach and invite her to sign my shoe?
I was caught in the shy boy’s dilemma – I couldn’t just ignore my sweaty palms and soaring blood-pressure. On the other hand I was confident that actually communicating my feelings would result in me receiving an instantaneously lethal dose of high-energy embarrassment. I discovered I had a rare talent: I managed to remain imapled on the horns of that dilemma for many years. During that time I wrote to her not just daily but at times twice daily without ever actually telling her how I felt. Heaven only knows what she made of it. I fear that, were she to tell me, the bolt of embarrassment I avoided in my teens would find me now, frying me to the soles of my shoes.
There came a time, I cannot pin-point when, when my heart stopped racing. As time passed I fell again for other people in ways that were different but which I at least now recognised as love. Then, one night in late summer, stood by P’s front door, I wondered whether to tell her how I felt or to run away and write an amusing letter. She leaned forward and kissed me. I am different now – transformed, which is what love does to you when you let it.
Very poignant. And very brilliant, typically.
(I miss having my heart race. Sometimes I wonder if it really will again, and if I’ll care when I realise it won’t.
And other times, I don’t believe a word of such ridiculous adult propaganda, and I’m again content to be the kid I always was and will be).
French exchange trip, eh? Ah, me too. Heady days.
Yeah, the positives and negatives of facebook I guess.
Lovely post, I’ve missed your writing.
Does this mean you are back from your travels?
My God, this was a gorgeous post. Funny, poignant, gorgeous. You must post more often though, because I go through awful withdrawals when you don’t.
P never got the offer to sign your shoe then no?
😉
That is a most exceptional post, Moobs! I laughed, sighed and all those other stages in the middle of the two.
You do know I’m going to have to go look up the first girl I fancied on Facebook now though, don’t you? I’m no more likely to talk to her now than I was then, but you’ve made me curious. (And remember the day she needed extra maths help and I was the only one conversant in trig.)
Oh, gosh, all that love talk and I forgot the bit I actually wanted to comment on! The internet has changed things a lot, I agree. I have people whom I count among my best friends yet haven’t met, and also like you have now got contact with people who I said bye to after school and haven’t met personally since.
So many parts of this story left to tell, my friend. What is the recent communication with the Frenchy? Why was the nouveau Texan in touch? How did you meet P? How did your behaviour change?
Ah, whatever. I’m simply blissed to read a post from you.
You slay me with your exquisite writing. And, I’m a filthy tart for a funny guy.
“I fell like a piano going down a staircase.”
*sigh*
*applause*
(And hey…thanks. I look only slightly better now. Although I wish I still had that coat.)
I remember CIX! I used it too for a few years! And that was (mumble) years ago!
Excellent post Moobs!
Ahhhh – so lovely! Thank you! It’s rare to find someone who can bring love all the way around. P’s one lucky girl.
Since nobody has copped to it yet, most of us teenage girls were just as nervous when in the presence of one we had fallen for. An annoying and intensely intoxicating experience at the same time, as I recall.
Good to read you, again, and thanks for stopping by my place.
Was she important enough to continue the contact? Are you answering her emails?
I think also most teenage girls twigged that if a boy asked you to sign his shoe (or put ice down the back of your neck, or just hung around at school insulting you randomly) then he probably was interested. Letters twice a day would probably have tipped her off …
Funny!
Men with beards, men with motorcycles (I was a compuserve chap myself – they had a similar bulletin board arrangement).
And an Essex boy? (Harwich for the continent, Frinton for the incontinent)…
My dh back then RAN a bulletin board and they had ‘meets’ where they all did things like scavenger hunts and so on…then talked about it on the boards.
Now they talk about the bulletin boards on facebook…..evolution???
Ah yes, the tightened chest and foggy mind, what a marvellous feeling that is.
Brilliant.
Lovely post.
I had a boyfriend in 1991 who was into the computer. He showed me how to do instant messages…they were like a ticker running on the bottom of the screen. No bells or whistles, just chatting on the computer with strangers. I told my bf, Dan, that I found it boring…Then in 2003 he tried to convince me to get a weblog…I told him I didn’t understand why I would want to do that. Oops. He was right, I was wrong. Which he would love to hear but I haven’t chatted with him in awhile. He is one of the friends I have had on and off for years and now we seem mostly “off”…
I hesitate to even try to fashion a comment after an essay so lovely, so I’ll just simply clap and say ‘well done.’
AND you get to invite Teh Internet people to your parties to meet the lovely P.
oh god how you shame us. I don’t think i even had an email address until 1999 or knew what the web was other than that spiders lived in it. Beautiful post…as always.
Hmm. I remember being one who conversed by letter and utterly adored someone who could write back to me with the same energy, literacy and sarcasm I sent him. He was my closest friend, my mate, my shoulder to cry on.
It all went so wonderfully wekk, until, that one night when he dropped me home, and I realised I had been so utterly decieved. There in the half-light, he tried to kiss me, and I was dumbstruck. How naive I was. As I played everything back I realised I it could look like I had led him on, but it wasn’t my intention at all. Oh how embarrassing to think of it now. I cried for days that I had hurt him. Still. We live and learn.
I’m always a sucker for a man who can use words well and make me laugh…………
Moobs, you are simply the best.
I love how written exchanges (including the internet…and here we are) can connect people. But sometimes you just have to stick your neck out and kiss someone. What a lovely story…so lyrically told.