1993 was the year I started secondary school.
I’m not generally good with dates, and I remember this one mainly because I remember the log-in code I was given for the school computer network. My initials, plus the year I started Year 7. The idea that the school even had a computer “network” seemed like the stuff of science fiction at the time.
My junior school, I think, had roughly three computers, shared between a hundred or so children. Each of these gigantic, buff-coloured boxes was placed in the corner of a classroom, where use was carefully rationed. We were put into pairs, a rota was made, and when our names came around every couple of weeks it was our pair’s turn to go and do something on the computer.
We typed poems on Caxton, in huge, unreadable fonts. We drew crude doodles in paint, and frequently ended up filling the whole screen in green because we left a little gap when we drew the tree that we actually wanted to colour in. Pod was commanded to cry, dance, jump, skip and fly. We printed off our work on rolls of translucently thin paper. And, best of all, we ripped off the punched, perforated edges and concertinaed them together to make “caterpillars”.
By contrast, at secondary school there was a whole room full of computers. Chunky monitors and towering disk drives stretching out like an American city.
We were shown how to use spreadsheets, and with a child’s innocence, I wondered what use anyone could possibly have for such a thing. I struggled to get to grips with basic word processing programs, which always seemed to turn into a sort of text-based Escher painting any time I tried to edit anything. For a long time I concluded that it was far easier to just handwrite my damn homework than faff around with the stupid “Write” program or whatever it was called.
But the room itself, I found exciting. Even a few years before the connection to “the world wide web” dropped a massive culture bomb right in the middle of our little nineties kid lives, those mini tower blocks contained so much possibility. The city of mysterious information, and as yet not understood.
An actual trip to a big city was a different thing then too. At fifteen there were few things more thrilling than a day in Birmingham with the huge library with windowsills you could sit on, and the Bullring before it got tarted up and when it was still full of cheap fishnet stockings and sticky boxes of incense cones. Tower Records with the promise of an obscure early CD by your new favourite band – the one you’ve been searching for in vain for months. The brightly coloured hair of older teens walking into the “alternative” haven that was the Oasis – back when finding pink hair dye and actually getting it to work on your hair was a serious achievement. In Birmingham I tried a taco for the first time and I felt like my worldliness increased tenfold. The city was a place a bored and boring teenager could go to scope out an identity and buy the kit to go with it. I suppose eventually the computer room delivered on that promise too – kind of.
Now I live on the outskirts of a city and I never go into the centre if I can help it. The shops bore me, the crowds irritate me, I can get everything online anyway – the thrill of finding a rare CD or a pot of affordable pink hair dye is long gone.
And I sit in front of a computer every day. I have my own log in. I use spreadsheets with a speed and ease that would once surely have seemed like a superpower. I word-process so much that all those hours of handwriting practice back in junior school have become completely redundant. I have a computer that literally sits on my lap at home, and another one that slides into my pocket and follows me around everywhere I go, even when I wish I could shake it off.
In 1993, this world, this life, would have seemed so far beyond the early sci-fi city blocks of the Year 7 computer room (or the taco stalls of Birmingham, for that matter). Would it have excited me, to know these things were coming? And if so, why do both computers and cities seem so god damn boring in 2023? Is it just them that’s changed, or is it me?
Lately I’ve been reading:
Winchelsea by Alex Preston I loved this so much. The story rips by, the protagonist has an incredibly engaging voice, and the historical detail adds to, rather than distracts from the narrative. The author apparently intended this as a “grown up Moonfleet” – which was my instant thought from the first chapter too, but it also has touches of Daphne Du Maurier there with the coastal setting, smuggling themes and ambiguity around identity and gender. I really loved this.
Working On:
I’m helping to put together a ghost story event in my local area at the moment, which is pretty exciting, so there’s a lot of work going on there. I’ve also just finished the first draft of a story provisionally called Cronology (yes, that spelling is correct), which I am sort of envisaging as a companion piece to Anthropocene. The idea I have at the moment is a cycle of three stories, each with a link to the archetypes: Maid, Mother, Crone.
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