Way Back When

                                                               

At 43 I’m old enough to remember a time when you couldn’t just go on the internet to get answers to questions that arose in your head. In the distant days of the late eighties/early nineties, like a poor man’s Waterboy, I did a lot of wondering, guessing, and trying to imagine.

For example, if I took to wondering where a certain place was, say Mobile, Alabama, after listening to Bob singing about it, I needed a hardcopy map to check, or a globe to spin, or I needed to ask another human being.

Now it’s all so different. You simply drill down into Google Earth on your device du jour and, presto, you’re there. With Street View you can even take a virtual walk around. Of course, there are exceptions. I recently tried to tour Damascus in this manner only to find a looped shot of a near-empty market square from 2008. One poor devil stood in a doorway, oblivious to the carnage to come.

As a bookish boy and a bookish young man, book reviews were a favourite in those days. Newspapers were invariably black and white, as perhaps was the world. The eye-catching colour glossiness of today’s newspapers just didn’t exist. Still the words, as ever, coloured the imagination. As the esteemed John Banville has said: “The process of changing black dots on a white page into images in your mind. Your imagination working a transformative magic.”

Anyway, as I read the reviews, I often came upon things I did not know and could not guess. On one occasion in 1988, a reviewer mentioned William, 3^rd Baron Vaux of Harrowden. My young mind grew curious. With no Wikipedia to turn to, a parent would suffice.

“Mam, who was William, 3^rd Baron Vaux of Harrowden?” I asked.

“How the feck should I know,” Mam rejoindered.

The internet is now like a vast Ilac Central Library for the world.

In those halcyon days I remember reading an article on Fay Weldon, and trying to think what age she could be, and, although I tried, I was none the wiser for who could I ask? A search engine was something a mechanic did when servicing a car. Who could I turn to? One of my Dublin ruffian pals?

“Hey, Git, what age would you say the British literary novelist Fay Weldon is?”

“Get up the yard, ya ponce!” would have been the response.

Social networking involved things like cycling from Beaumont to Ballymun, or talking to some Raheny girls on the way to the famed Grove discotheque. Nowadays, as everybody knows, that whole thing has exploded—and it’s all online. On line back then was somewhere my mother hung the washing. Facebook was what you did when cramming for an exam—as in, bury your nose in one.

Now and again I was moved to write turgid teenage verse. I scribbled it in copybooks and on scraps of paper. There was no ‘Notes’ section of the iPhone for my jottings. Eye phone was the act of waiting for someone special to call; the muse usually for your dreadful poems. As for saving stuff, you threw it in a drawer. A flashkey was a gaudy key-ring brought back from Bundoran.

My younger self had a love of gossip; I still do. I’m human after all. But it’s probably not such a good thing. In 1990 someone lent me a Tom Waits tape explaining in the process “Your man is mad for the gargle.”

I loved the music on the tape. But what could I learn about the singer’s relationship with booze? Nada, zero, zilch, thankfully. There was no humongous virtual gossipmonger to ask “Tom Waits alcohol?” So I let the music sing for itself, and suppressed my thirst for gossip. Halcyon days indeed.

© Brian Ahern 2014