Three Five

A brief moment of reflection

Today, potentially for the last time, I ticked the 20 - 34 box on a form. Fuck! But you know, age is a gift. I can’t remember where I saw it, but I read that millennials are the most adaptable people when it comes to tech (and life?) because we experienced the most rapid advancements of it. From a vinyl to a cassette tape to a CD to a mini disc to an MP3 player, to streaming on our phones. From a landline to a colourless brick phone (s/o one2one) to mini Nokias to smartphones. From a typewriter to a tablet. We had to move through these times with a swiftness that no other generation has or will likely experience for a long time.  

We were the last generation to enjoy life without technology on this scale. When boredom was something I could let myself feel, when you had to wait for your favourite TV show to come on, when I had the patience and attention span to read tons and tons of books. When you had to go and buy an album from HMV to hear it. The joy of hearing your favourite song come on the radio. We collected gel pens and rubbers and took pride in our funky pencil cases and wrote each other letters. No Google maps, no bus time app, no way of knowing train times unless you went to the station. Smoking inside nightclubs. Disposable cameras we’d buy from Boots before a night out. As a teenager you’d buy a £4 weekly bus pass, no Oysters, only cash or paper passes. Me and D would sit at home with pritt stick and old bus passes and cut the numbers out of them, little squares of numbers scattered on the table, and we’d stick them onto old passes to create ones that could pass as valid for the new week. Just flash it quickly. Every so often the bus driver would call us back and kick us off for showing them a bullshit pass.

I wonder if my daughter is going to think wtf, my mum was born in the 1900’s. The 1980s. 

Croydon was different then, too. It was still rough around the edges but richer, there was a real culture particularly around music, rowdy but enough community that you wanted to stick around. A south London hub. I bought this fake I.D, this terrible Italian I.D card that I unbelievably successfully used to get into clubs. Black Sheep Bar, where I saw Skream and tried to make him crowd surf, Big Apple Records on Surrey Street which was the best vinyl shop and the birthplace, I think I can say, of dubstep. There was that energy there, that energy when you’re on the precipice of something great, something new.  

In the noughties we had time to sit on the floor in front of the mirror and try elaborate Croydoneque hair styles. Plaits, perms, hair extensions, tons of gel, hair bobbles. Became a master of eyeliner, could do it standing up on a bus. Lots of grease and big earrings and metal combs in our bags. Baby Phat, Rocawear, Lot 29, Evisu, Avirex. There was a shop on Coldharbour Lane we’d flock to, Real McCoy, to get our fix of American streetwear. When American hip-hop was everything. Dub Vendor on Lavender Hill in Clapham was the place you went to get your niche stuff that HMV or Virgin music stores didn’t sell.

When your phone wasn’t on silent because you weren’t digitally overstimulated, when Champion by DJ Odds was everyone’s ringtone, or Sticky’s Golly Gosh. When you couldn’t run with your discman because the CD would skip. I dunno, it’s weird but when I hear old school grime now I get flashbacks of who I was; that girl was damaged, that girl was running around the city at night when she should have been home, that girl just wanted to be held and now here I am, that girl, but no longer that girl, holding my little girl. Being a parent reminds me of the feeling of coming off a red-eye. You feel amazing from the trip but you also feel absolutely fucked and you say, when I get home I’ll sleep off the jetleg and the sleepless night and I’ll feel right as rain again. The thing is with parenthood, that night of sleep never comes, or perhaps it’s just never enough recuperation.

As I approach 35, I’m starting to finally shed the skin of who I was, and now I’m just learning what’s underneath that. I’ll always be grateful that grime music held me and all my anger, the city held me and all my energy, libraries held me and all my thoughts. It was a feeling and a time that can’t be emulated in a smart phone generation, in the midst of a mass mission of gentrification of the city, where Boxparks and Foxtons pop up like colds. When nobody wanted to live in Brixton, when me and A would go there to pick up a five bag of mersh outside the Ritzy after college. I looked at Brixton on Rightmove when I was looking for a place with my husband, nothing available within our budget. Can’t explain how crazy that is. The cuntry invasion of south London in places they wouldn’t have considered visiting once upon a time. Peckham, Streatham, Elephant and Castle. My daughter won’t grow up in the same city and I have no idea, maybe that’s a good thing, maybe I just don’t see it yet. Too much nostalgia clouding my vision today and the future is unknown. I suppose I’m now one of those people who says ‘it’s not like the good old days’, and I think that may be the definition of middle-aged. And you know what, I’m okay with that ;)