Half a life away

There has been a thing going around that there internet they’ve got these days where people are putting up photos of them at 20. Like all the things on the internet, I have no idea why it started but I decided to try and find a photo of myself at 20.

This was difficult because I am so old. Having recently turned 40, 20 is literally half of my life away. Facebook didn’t exist back then. When I was 20 we had only recently actually got the internet.

I managed to find the photos on this post on Livejournal. For those not old enough to remember, Livejournal was like Facebook except you only chatted to your friends and people were actually nice to each other. You’d also often write long(ish) journal entries and in hindsight it might be another reason why I quite enjoy blogging.

I clearly hadn’t worked out how to take a photo on the camera attached to the computer and also look at the camera at the same time. Although this was also the days of MySpace and not looking at the camera was the cool thing to do.

The photos are probably not when I was exactly 20. The one with the hat and the one with the tie are probably the closest but maybe slightly after. The mohawk came around when I was probably around 24.

I went through a lot of phases when I had hair. There was the Kurt Cobain/Chris Jericho bleached blond long hair and beard phase, there was the Elliott Smith messy long dark hair (probably the hat photo ear), there were a number of dye jobs ranging from orange to pink to something vaguely resembling blue. During some of the Battleska years I had a mohawk cut by our drummer as can be seen in photo 3, which was initially my regular hair colour and then became bleached blonde at some point. After that I had a long untidy goatee beard for a number of years.

It’s fair to say it took me a while to settle into a look.  It was partly enforced by my hair deciding it no longer wanted to be attached to my head.

In a way, my hair and facial hair could possibly be said to be a metaphor for my life. It wasn’t until I settled into my current grade 0 up top and grade 1.5 on the chin that I felt like I started to settle into my life. Or maybe that’s just me reading a bit too much into the significance of hair. Those of us who don’t have it tend to think it’s quite important.

“What were you like at 20?” I hear you not ask at all. Well, I shall tell you…

I was studying philosophy at the University of Kent. Mainly because I had no idea what to do with my life after school and it delayed having to get a job. It gave me a good understanding of ethics, but other than that I have not used it at any point in my life since. I was a year old than most of my classmates as I’d managed to drag out my A-levels to 3 years, so I had good form on putting off employment.

I had recently learned to drive using my student loan to pay for lessons taught by Stuart Lee (not that one) and would drive up to uni, sometimes offering lifts to others who were going to college/uni in Canterbury. Every Thursday I would road trip at stupid o’clock in the morning with Luke, Emma and Paul and we would drive past a sign that said “Caution: Mud On Road” yet never saw any mud. It was usually the highlight of our journey as we were sleepy teenagers.

I was living at home with my parents which was a way to do uni and not get into debt. The levels of debt that were got into at that age however were insignificant to the levels that students get into these days. I think I was in the first year of tuition fees and they were something like £1,500 per year but reduced depending on your parents’ income.

It also seems, from reading a few of my Livejournal entries, that I was a bit of an emo always moping about girls. This was a phase that probably lasted most of my twenties.