This essay is featured in our 2020-2024 book. You can buy it in the shop.
"For some reason my Nokia 6680 called out to me this year. Not literally – it hadn’t been turned on since I upgraded and discarded it. But I found myself drawn to the drawer. Minutes later I’d bought a new battery and charger on ebay and the next day I was eagerly booting it up."
With no SIM, most of these extra features were useless when I switched it on this year. But, the text messages, impervious to the march of progress, remained. 314 received messages and 20 sent.
It’s easy to characterise years of your life by the big events that happened in them. The year you left home (1998), the year you met the love of your life (2010), the year you lived by the Mediterranean (2017), the year you stopped smoking (2003). And with a bit of time and thought you can probably piece together a few more events in there, maybe even place them in order and fill them out to enrich the story.
I’m not sure I ever really gave 2006 much thought before this year. Some things happened, of course they did, but nothing significant.
Reading through the best part of a year’s worth of lopsided conversations forced me to dig deep into my memory to try and piece together events, feelings, places and people I hadn’t thought about for a long time. But more than that, it was like reading a script of what happened to me in 2006, written by somebody else.
Individually, the messages are quite banal. They’re mostly about meeting up or not meeting up or saying how it was good to meet up or sorry we missed each other. But knowing the characters and the places they’re talking about brings the script to life in a hazy technicolor that I’ve not been able to stop thinking about.
"Reading through the best part of a year’s worth of lopsided conversations forced me to dig deep into my memory to try and piece together events, feelings, places and people I hadn’t thought about for a long time. But more than that, it was like reading a script of what happened to me in 2006, written by somebody else."
This is not an exciting story. I was 26 and living in the Kentish Town area of London at the time. The text messages tell me the following story, which is only even slightly interesting to people who perhaps were around at the time or care enough about me now to be curious about what I was like then.
I ended January 2006 playing the first and last gig of a band I was in with a broken arm. Not long after that I took a healthy redundancy from a job I didn’t care about and spent the next three or four months going to about four gigs a week, mostly to see friends’ unsigned bands. I also went out a lot in London and we (my three friends from university who I was living with) had two big parties at our flat. I also spent a lot of time visiting a friend in Brighton where I also went out a lot.
As the summer drew near, the money started running out so I went out a bit less, but still went to lots of gigs, including putting one on with a new band I was in. I ended up having to get a job but made a conscious effort to at least pick a sector I believed in so the job might mean more to me. My flatmates started moving in with their girlfriends and I made the move to east London.
By September 2006 I was changing phones again so the story dries up. With the benefit of elapsed time and 314 text messages read in chronological order, I can see how that year marked a transition from one period of my life to another. Reliving my year through the conversations I had in it (often having to imagine my side) has sent me back to places I didn’t think I would ever spend much time in again.
There are lots of bad reasons for hanging on to defunct electronic stuff, but this is a good one.
This is the first one!
Published tomorrow!