1983

My cultural re-enactment project, which lags three and a quarter dozen years behind the present, has now hit 1983 CE. For those of you who are unfamiliar with what I’m doing, for the past five or six years or so I’ve been attempting to recall vividly and enter into the events of thirty-nine years previously. One reason I’m doing this is to capture the cultural shift which occurred during this time associated with the breakdown of the apparent post-war consensus and the advent of Thatcherism and its successors. Moreover, for me it marks an important period in my formative years, as it were. One could argue that all years are formative, and this is true, and it’s important not to consider certain aspects of oneself as rigidly and irrevocably defined, but most people would probably claim that important events happen early in one’s life.

There’s a notion in psychology called the “reminiscence bump”. This is the idea that one’s most prominent memories are laid down between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. Twenty-five also marks the point at which the brain becomes mature. As I have often alluded to, the use of the duodecimal system makes a lot more sense than the decimal, and this is an example of that, as the age up to a dozen can then be seen to represent childhood and the age up to two dozen a re-conceptualised adolescence, where people can perhaps be forgiven for certain failings which older adults might be expected to take more responsibility for. In the duodecimal system, the year 1983₁₀ becomes 1193₁₂, so it’s in the same position in the decade as in the twelve-year cycle, though further from the end of the “great turn” of a gross of years, which occurs in 2016₁₀. For me, 1983 is the first full year of my own reminiscence bump, as I was fifteen years and five months by the start of the year. There are various views about what this is about. One is that it’s simply that more changes happen during this decade of life, so they’re simply more memorable, but a lot is linked to self-identity regardless of the cause. Unlike negative events, happy occurrences show a peak of recall at this time. It may be that they are remembered because they’re in a period of rapid change followed by a relatively uneventful stretch. However, I distinctly remember thinking of 2002 as the first year nothing major happened which was new, leading to a period of rather depressing rumination lasting several years. Nonetheless I do have the bump.

It was my O-level year. After taking them, I catastrophised and expected to fail most of them and be unemployed with no prospects from August onward. I was wrong. In particular this meant I’d have less contact with the girl I was in love with the idea of being in love with, who is now my oldest friend. 1982 had had the feeling of “endless summer” about it. I can’t be more specific. Summer 1983 was more melancholy and “moody teenagery”.

In a broader perspective, it was also the year I first realised we didn’t have fixed term parliaments in the UK, when Thatcher called a snap election to take advantage of the Falklands Factor. I found this somewhat enraging but mainly depressing. The day I heard about the election, I was feeling really pissed off walking down Stour Street in Canterbury when I was accosted by two members of the pro-Albanian communist party whose actual name I forget, and enthusiastically, and to them startlingly, bought their newspaper. This could do with some context. This was the first time I’d encountered the “silly newspaper” phenomenon where a tiny splinter group purporting or purported to be on the hard left produces its own newspaper to express its opinion on current affairs. I would expect this to have largely died out nowadays, but I don’t know.

It was also the year I learnt most about computers. Our family had just acquired a ZX81, which irritated me because of its low specs but it did lead to me learning BASIC, or Nine Tiles’ version thereof, and of course Z80 assembler and machine code. I went on to learn FORTH, ALGOL-60 and FORTRAN that year too, just for the hell of it. I wrote a few programs, including a virus, but I was also very conflicted about the whole thing because I felt like it was unhealthily obsessive of me to be this into computers. I still think that now sometimes. I was also worried that I was supporting a technology which might be destroying jobs and livelihoods, but this wasn’t really a problem at the time and it was actually a booming industry at that point. The year probably marks the peak of diversity for eight-bit microcomputers, and there’s a weird contrast here between the renowned “1983 Video Game Crash” and what I perceived to be a huge surge in success in this area. It may be the contrast between microcomputers and consoles or more noticeable in North America than Europe. At the time I considered gaming to be a guilty pleasure and was often quite bored by it. My main focus of interest was on computer graphics, and had been for a couple of years. The ZX81 was a terrible platform for this, although some tweaks were able to improve this somewhat.

Ironically, my focus on computers led in a few months to being better-informed and more skilled at IT than other pupils at my school who were studying it at A-level, while in the meantime worrying about failing my O-levels. This mismatch still happens today and I tend to be very unaware of my strengths and weaknesses, and also not apply my knowledge practically. When I learnt cursive handwriting, it was confined to practice books for a long time before I started using it in my more general schoolwork. I’m sure this is very significant but I don’t really know what it means. Probably if I did it wouldn’t happen. I put it down to neurodiversity, though the details of that are more obscure.

A few stats:

The top-grossing film of the year was ‘Return Of The Jedi’, a film which, since I can’t stand the ‘Star Wars’ franchise, I have never seen. Out of a sense of duty I started watching it a few months ago and got about ten minutes in before I was bored stiff by the thing. The most popular single was Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’, which was okay but nothing special I thought, but The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’ won the Best Single award. Sting, and through him The Police, seems to have a disturbing obsession with jealousy and possessiveness. He even wrote a song about a dog once with that theme. The question arises of whether possessive “love” was considered positive at that point. Certainly there are later examples such as ‘When Harry Met Sally’ where there seems to be no problem with men stalking women but somehow if it’s the other way round you’re a bunny boiler, as in ‘Fatal Attraction’. ‘Play Misty For Me’ dates from 1971 but again the villain is female. I can never work out exactly what Sting is doing there, but the question arises of whether it was received in the manner intended. It was, after all, another time.

‘Coronation Street’ was the most watched TV programme. I probably wouldn’t’ve watched it, although I did, mainly because I tended not to watch television at the time at all. I was mainly a Radio 4 listener, although by that time I was also listening to a lot of Radio 1 at the weekends, and from study leave and through the summer also during the day through the week. This meant I heard a lot of “Our Tune” that year. Less said about that the better, probably.

I was probably atypical for a British teen in that I bought very few records. I’ve always been very nervous of vinyl and tended to focus on cassettes. If I remember correctly, I bought three singles in 1983: the Stranglers’ ‘European Female’, ‘Midnight Summer Dream’ and the Lotus Eaters’ ‘First Pictures Of You’. That’s probably it unless the 12″ of ‘Uncertain Smile’ counts. Vinyl seems very delicate and easily broken to me and I feel it degrades quite quickly. My real days of buying vinyl were the late 1990s and the first decade of this century, when I got a load of second hand records from charity shops. I also had basically no money. I didn’t get a paid job until the year after.

There were a number of landmark events that year. The first was the school exchange visit to Dunkerque, which at the time I regarded as the highlight of my life. That week was the happiest one of my recollection and it was drastically different from anything else I’d done up until then. I remember a mosh pit, and generally a very sociable and enjoyable time. ‘Safety Dance’ by Men Without Hats, came out at about this time, which is about mosh pits.

Thinking back at that time brings an impression of melancholy in a kind of self-indulgent way, kidding myself that I was yearning after a particular girl who was now my friend, loads of music, tinkering around guiltily with a computer and reading a lot about IT and come to think of it not actually reading many books apart from that, which was unusual for me at the time. I did look at a fair number of art books. John Peel and Anne Nightingale were very important to me. Politically it was all pretty depressing. CND was in its ascendancy, but I remained to be convinced it was the right way to go. A couple of years later I not only became convinced but went on to help run the local CND group, not very competently. The landslide Tory victory was iredeemably depressing. Jeremy Corbyn became an MP, and I quickly noticed that his views seemed very reasonable compared to almost everyone else in Parliament. Apparently Blair and Brown also entered Parliament but they were just nothing compared to him and I hadn’t even heard of them until the mid-1990s. Tony Benn was still around of course. The summer was unusually hot and sunny. NHS cleaning services were privatised. A couple of years after this, I experienced a pang of conscience when I took a cleaning job with Hospital Hygiene Services at the local hospital, and there is in fact a personal trend here of wanting to work in a nationalised industry but finding it increasingly difficult to do so, to the extent that for a long time it was almost impossible to reconcile paid work with my conscience.

Less political happenings included the arrival of the CD to market, although CDs were being played on the radio the previous year. There was controversy about the cold perfection of the sound quality, which some people felt was “too good” and removed feeling from the listening experience. This trend has continued to this day, for instance with the audiophile preference for analogue recording and reproduction, the Loudness War, compression artifacts on MP3s, and in other areas the replacement of CRT tubes with flat TFT displays. There’s a sense of disconnection this plugs into. With chemical photography and analogue recording onto vinyl, it feels like there’s a more direct link between the singer or musical instrument, the grooves being laid down from the magnetic tape, the pressing onto vinyl and the stylus picking up those grooves and converting them back to audio. Likewise, with a photograph light has been focussed from a scene, caused chemical reactions on a surface which is then processed and converted directly to physical film emulsion. There seems to be a physical chain which is broken by digital processing, and I can relate to that. It also feels like we lose control when these processes are performed by chips manufactured in clean rooms and the like by extremely large companies. That said, nostalgia for the CD now exists, since CDs are not digitally compressed in the same way as MP3s are, and they are also physical manifestations of what you’ve bought. In 1983, however, CDs and their players were very much the preserve of the yuppie and possibly the audiophile.

Certain inevitabilities came to pass this year too. The pound coin was introduced: something which had been long anticipated. The twenty pence coin had been issued the previous year, and the ten franc piece had recently been introduced in France, with some similarities to the new British coin. This also meant the pound note was on its way out, though they stayed legal tender in England for another five years. Since Thatcher was in power at the time, the pound coin was compared to her as being “thick, brassy and thinks it’s a sovereign”. The internet began to use TCP/IP, although for most people, including myself, this was entirely unknown and foreign. At the time, there were teletext and bulletin boards, and that was it for most of the public.

AIDS was becoming significant. Terrence Higgins had become the first person to die of it the previous year but I don’t recall that the government had started to use it as an excuse for homophobia. That said, the situation regarding homosexuality was still pretty poor at this point, with the age of consent still being at twenty-one, and because of my age I came to associate sex with danger in that respect before I had had any sexual experiences with another person. I suspect this juxtaposition is not so firmly established in most people older than I.

I was finding the future looked pretty grim and depressing at this stage, not just for myself but for the world in general. It may have been the year when I wrote my vision of the probable future, which involved almost universal poverty and unemployment with considerable progress in computing and IT destroying most paid work without replacing it. I actually envisaged 95% unemployment, and I attributed the problem, and I still think this is significant, to a payoff between space travel and IT. I’ll probably go into this in more depth in a later post, but the gist of my view is that there’s a tension between advances in information technology and human space travel where one suffers if the other advances. Hence we have arrived in a present where IT is predominant and space exploration practically non-existent in terms of humans in space, but if space travel had become popular and advanced, it would probably have been because IT didn’t advance as much, and 1983 seems to have been the year I thought of this.

It was also the last year I was confident about mainstream literature. I was entirely open to reading mainstream literary novels and poetry at this point, and felt I got a lot out of them. I have certain views on this. On the one hand, there is the perspective that reading mainstream literature improves empathy. On the other, according to Shelley “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, and I think this is potentially a bad thing. The behaviour and emotions depicted in novels and poetry kind of makes itself true by being expressed, and can lead to people having a particular view of their lives and the feelings and doings of themselves and others based on the suppositions of authors and poets, which seems to exclude other possible ways of being as a person. Nowadays I feel rather suspicious of literature for that reason, but there was also a very early fall from grace which took place the year after when it felt like my understanding for it was closed off irrevocably from me. But at this point I was flying high. I was even writing poetry, but that’s what angst-ridden teenagers do so that’s nothing special. I was really into Samuel Beckett, having forced my French exchange student to sit through endless televised plays of his, there being a season of them the previous year. I also had a mild interest in existentialism, although its apparent amorality was off-putting

Another aspect of my personality which hasn’t really expressed itself much is that far from being a “sciency” person, a category many people seem to want to put me in, I was pretty much an “arty” person and unsurprisingly quite pretentious. I was into Art Rock, embarrassed about my liking for Dalí and very much into other surrealists and absurdist drama. This has been expressed strongly at certain points in my life, and one of them was my mid-teens. There was a recurrence in my early twenties. Fashion-wise, I was afraid to express myself at all and was in the phase, which lasted throughout the ’80s, of believing it was possible to present a neutral image. I was mainly pining for a social life too, and probably my impression of Canterbury being boring stems from the difficulty of living in an outlying village. I used to walk a lot. I also chose my A-levels, which committed me to the humanities or social sciences at degree level.

That, then, is my 1983. It was kind of intermediate between the more caring attitudes of the ’70s, still had a lot of the prejudice which was normal at the time, but government policy had yet to succeed in swatting all the positive aspects of the post-war period. For me it was also something of a watershed year with a number of crucial aspects of my identity being laid down at that point.

Unrequited Love

Photo by Michelle Leman on Pexels.com

This is a bit of an experiment. I seem to have had positive reactions from personal posts, so I thought I’d try one here. It doesn’t start off that way, but ends up intensely so.

Limerence.

A while ago, I used to run a support group for people who were romantically stuck on one individual and couldn’t do anything about it. It apparently worked quite well although with hindsight I’m not sure it actually helped. It’s a little like this blog in a way. The original purpose of this blog was for me to dump stuff which was on my mind so it didn’t distract me from doing other things, but in fact it seems to feed the urge to write. Similarly, the fact that people had a place to go where they could express their feelings about this other person, whoever it might be, I now think may have fed their craving, as it were, and I’m not now sure it was a good idea. Nonetheless, with my history I was probably a good choice for the group. The way it happened was that a young woman with the problem had a mutual acquaintance who knew about my history and decided I was a good fit because he was a first-hand witness to what had happened.

To be honest, I’m not sure what would actually have helped. The alternatives seem to be either to express yourself, though probably not to the object of your affections, or to try to ignore it and hope it goes away, but either of these isn’t ideal because in the former case it seems to stoke it and in the latter it pushes harder until you have to acknowledge it for the sheer sake of honesty to yourself. It just will become the element in the room. Another option might be to keep yourself busy.

Dorothy Tennov is a psychologist specialising in unrequited love, and it was her who invented the word “limerence”. It’s a useful word meaning, to quote Wikipedia:

A state of mind which results from a romantic attraction to another person and typically includes obsessive thoughts and fantasies and a desire to form or maintain a relationship with the object of love and have one’s feelings reciprocated.

One of the purposes of using the word limerence is that if you don’t, you can easily get bogged down in a circular conversation or intenal rumination about whether it’s love or infatuation rather than getting past that question and addressing the actual problem. Some of the time, of course, it isn’t a problem at all because it’s simply the mechanism which gets two people together into a relationship which is real, although there may be other issues there such as what they call “falling in love too easily”. Tennov’s word enables one to name something which is a real psychological phenomenon. The problem is that we have a biological drive to do this which will continue to push at us until it gets resolved. Although it has obsessive-compulsive elements to it, anyone, apart presumably from aromantic people, can fall victim to this phenomenon and in fact having obsessive-compulsive personality traits is not a good predictor of whether this will happen. It can also, very unfortunately, edge into erotomania and stalking, although not for most people who become limerent.

It’s easily possible that the problem won’t resolve at all. Tennov quotes a case where someone became fixated on someone in her adolescence and her diaries showed that this continued for the next seventy-six years, after which she died. No use to anyone else and completely tied up in someone, regardless of what her prospects would have been for another situation, the poor woman died sad and alone, never having had a relationship, because of this fixation. And the thing to bear in mind is, this is a vulnerability which most people have.

A certain set of circumstances usually leads to persistent and unsatisfied limerence, and I can confirm that this pattern was common in the group. An initial event draws a person to someone’s attention and they develop the usual “falling in love”-type emotional and thought pattern which is presumably supposed to satisfy the function of biological reproduction, although there is a major caveat here: it obviously isn’t confined to heterosexual couples. Then something happens which frustrates the limerent individual’s ability to achieve closure. For instance, the person concerned may move to a distant part of the country or turn out to be in a stable relationship. Since it’s happened to me twice, I’ve unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for the support group, been forced to become an expert in this, although the first case is less typical than the second, which is more text book. The way it happened can be easily traced with hindsight, and in fact I was more or less aware of it at the time. Vicky happened to choose to go on a tour of Europe with her partner at the point when I would’ve wanted to resolve it. Note that resolution absolutely did not mean going out with her. Rather, I wanted a short, sharp rejection which would make it clear that nothing could happen. It has also been mentioned that it was odd that she didn’t “do the boyfriend mention”. I think this is because she was oblivious of what was happening, or aware of it but didn’t consider it her problem, which is true. She didn’t owe me anything. It just happened. I got unlucky.

Incidentally, you might think it’s a bit careless of me to use her real name, although obviously I’m not going to mention her surname. In my defence, it’s widely known what happened, it’s quite a common name and she’s never going to read this.

Although there is a pattern to the circumstances in which this kind of thing happens, certain people are more susceptible than others. For instance, there is a tendency for them to test with a significantly higher IQ than average, and they tend to be underoccupied in some way. These things are known from the literature. Another aspect some people are aware of, although so far as I know it isn’t backed up by any research, is that it can be a mid-life crisis-type thing. That was obviously not true of me. Going back to the first two, the mind tends to find things to occupy itself in a vacuum. I’ve already mentioned the Ganzfeld state of consciousness, and there are other happenings such as Charles Bonnett Syndrome. The brain will often attempt to fill in blanks where input is not available, particularly when someone is quite imaginative. Therefore it’s possible to be quite reductive about this and look at it as a pretty straightforward process of one’s romantic proclivities colonising the empty space one wishes to be occupied by the object of one’s affections. The practice of constantly doodling love hearts and playing with the person’s name and initials comes to mind.

Unrequited love has serious consequences for the person feeling it. It can lead them to end their lives and break up their real, long-term relationships such as marriage. Other psychologists are not keen on the concept for some reason I haven’t been able to fathom. There’s also the question of cross-cultural applicability, since romantic love is not considered significant in every culture. Most of Tennov’s research used American cases. The idea of a biological drive that fuels this is also very much of its time, since she published in 1979 and it comes across as quite “Selfish Gene”-y, in the sense that it uses quite crude understandings of evolutionary psychology.

So there’s that. I should probably talk about personal experience although it seems quite egoistic.

When I was about sixteen, one of my teachers said that when one has fallen in love, the question doesn’t even occur to one that one is in love. This set the bar high for deciding what was love, because I question everything. Consequently throughout my late teens and early twenties I doubted my own feelings. I do believe that in the earlier case, I was more in love with the idea of being in love than actually in love, and there were complicated things going on there. That situation persisted for four and a half years from the age of fourteen. There was then a very sudden transfer of affection to Vicky. It became very urgent to “inject a bit of reality into the situation”, as I put it at the time. That is, find out what the real situation was and use that to defuse the “love bomb” and get past it. It did seem very likely that she would be in a relationship, but my feelings ran away with me. And I will say that. They did run away with me. I didn’t indulge them, fantasise about romantic love or anything like that. I simply had no control. The way I’d addressed the previous situation was to become friends with the girl, later woman, in question, and that persisted and went excellently. According to a friend of Vicky’s, she was not keen on having friendships with men and was very motivated by sexual attraction instead, which meant that wasn’t a viable route out of the situation. I have no idea if this is true or not.

Here’s a checklist to distinguish between love and infatuation:

(from Quora, will be removed on request, annoying typo).

I would say that my feelings for Vicky followed the list on the left. Although I’ve said that the transfer of affection was sudden, it had in fact been building for about nine months by the point it became frustrated. It was all about caring for her, it lasted years but it could not be honest because the situation made it impossible to talk to her about it. It was not based on physical attraction, which in fact I found off-putting. Since I don’t experience jealousy, that’s probably not worth including. Therefore, if this list is reliable (what do you think?) it really was love.

Incidentally, I don’t want this to be all about me in the sense that she is just some untouchable perfect being on a pedestal or something. I liked Vicky because her values and political beliefs were similar to mine, because she was a political activist and because she was somewhat academically inclined. She was also quite laid back and easy to relate to. I thought at the time that she would be one of a number of people who had those qualities, because it’s almost a stereotype of a lefty woman student, but strangely that combination never came up again. I didn’t meet one other person like her either at Leicester or Warwick.

One of the problems is that you can think you’ve got past it and then it all comes back again. Around eighteen months into my obsession, I realised I was still bent out of shape by her when she and her boyfriend split. Her relationship afforded me a degree of stability and even happiness while it was still happening, and I know I was particularly happy at that time, though possibly because that stability was able to hide from me the fact that there was still something there. In the meantime I did attempt to kindle interest in other people, which didn’t go well, hoping that that would get me past her. The trouble is that it was forced and I was not generally considered attractive either in appearance or personality. I also took great and futile care to present my image as uninteresting and neutral, which is of course impossible. Neutral, that is. Boring is easy.

I should of course talk about stalking, which is one way in which this can go very badly indeed. Another aspect of stalking is that prevention focusses on what happens after the fact when it seems much more likely that it can be prevented more effectively by including some kind of emotional literacy training in the school curriculum, or ensuring that as a home edder that you have “the talk”. The types are: intimacy seeking, incompetent, predatory, rejected and resentful. I have actually been stalked by two different people that I know of in my life, so I don’t take it lightly.

Incompetent stalkers are usually motivated by lust and/or loneliness, and the problem arises because they are insensitive to their target’s emotions. It tends to happen with neurodiverse people or people with learning difficulties.

Intimacy seeking stalkers tend to be erotomanic, a subject I’ll return to. They are also lonely and are often motivated by delusional beliefs about their target. Clearly someone who is delusional is not going to say they are in the midst of everything, so if I was in this category this would amount to my perception that Vicky was attracted to me. However, I’d like to emphasise that I didn’t stalk her. In fact I tried to avoid her in the hope that my feelings would pass.

Rejected stalkers have usually been in an intimate relationship with their target (incidentally I’m using the word “target” because I don’t want to say “victim”). They will usually either seek to get back together with the person or want what they think of as revenge. I have never and would never do this.

Finally, predatory stalkers usually wish to indulge a non-consensual and probably violent paraphilia with their targets and the act of stalking is gratifying in itself. I would say this gives people with paraphilias a bad name, and it should be stressed that they are not something which you should ever accept shame about. The problem with these people is that they are excessively focussed on the kink itself at the expense of seeking intimacy or using it as a symbol of closeness in consensual sex.

A few pieces of advice about stalkers. If they are seeking to mend a relationship or become intimate, targets are advised to state clearly and unambiguously that they reject their attentions. This is at least as much for the target’s peace of mind as it is for the stalker’s sake. Having said that, I have also to say that it seems unlikely that that would work. However, it does stop the target from feeling guilty and blaming themselves later.

If you’re being harassed on the ‘phone by a stalker, another piece of police advice is to install a new ‘phone line and tell your friends the number while leaving an answerphone on the old one. This helps you to gather evidence against the perpetrator. However, it also sounds quite outdated in today’s world of social media and the like.

Due to my later obsession, I was widely regarded as persona non grata by my acquaintances. Although this is understandable, it didn’t help. The widespread attitude towards me in any case was one of disrespect and keeping me at an emotional distance. It’s been suggested that this situation isn’t even really about Vicky but about being in the social outer darkness. That said, I did have real friends too, so I’m not sure about that. But being in that darkness is not helpful because it was merely an opportunity to ruminate unhelpfully. What was missing in all of this was feedback. Then again, nobody owed me anything so I don’t know where that left me.

Erotomania is alleged to be a rare mental condition where someone is fixated on the idea that someone is secretly in love with them. For once I have professional backing for saying that this does not describe the situation I was in, as a psychiatrist looked into it for me. One of the perks of having started a degree in psychology. It’s a type of delusional disorder, which is what we used to call “paranoia” in the widespread inadequacy of psychiatric terminology where relatively useless and vague terms replace formerly quite accurate ones. The patient may not even know the person on whom they’re fixated, or they may be dead. Ian McEwan did an excellent job of describing someone with erotomania in his novel ‘Enduring Love’, in which he portrays an otherwise heterosexual non-religious person becoming convinced that God wants him and another man to be together. Although erotomania is more common in women, men are more likely to act on it. It can occur alone, with no other sign of psychopathology, or may be associated with psychosis of other kinds. It can be worsened by substance abuse, including alcohol, and antidepressants. Stalkers sometimes believe their target is stalking them. It also happens that Leicester Uni specialises in stalking research.

What may be missing from this account so far is how I felt about all this, and of course it’s also important what Vicky felt, but all I can really get from that is that she was very uncomfortable being in my company, but about a year later things seemed to be okay and we did sort of become friends again although she was said still to be nervous around me. Apart from anything else, it was annoying that the whole time I was an undergraduate I was basically tied up with an obsession with a woman, because it probably did have quite a negative impact with how well I enjoyed myself and performed in both academia and elsewhere. I tried really hard to put myself off Vicky, for instance by concentrating on the actions she undertook which made herself attractive to many people, but this didn’t work. The reason for this, I think, is that there comes a point where you cannot disentangle yourself because you have fallen in love with the image but stay in love with the person. I was frustrated and annoyed with myself because I couldn’t dislodge the obsession no matter how I tried. At no point after the initial incident did I consider the prospect of a relationship either realistic or desirable. My attraction to her was a problem to be solved, rather an intractable one. And the irony was that what I thought I was aiming for was being honest with myself that I did find that construction of stereotypical beauty attractive, but that it was a way of being less serious about the prospects of being in love.

I still don’t understand why she knew me for nearly a year without doing the “boyfriend mention”. It must’ve been obvious that I was attracted to her. I can think of a couple of reasons. One is that her man was constantly in the background of her life and had been for five years by that point, so their relationship was taken for granted. Another is that I was so far beneath her idea of anyone she might consider going out with that she didn’t consider it worth mentioning. Or, it may simply have been out of respect that she considered friendship with a man to be entirely feasible, and in fact I agree with that. The only trouble is, apparently she didn’t.

As I’ve said before, one long-term issue is that I long ago ceased to trust my intuition, which was telling me, despite all rational indications to the contrary, that she was in fact attracted to me. This assumes there is no “league” of course. This distrust of intuition has been mentioned since by some people, for instance my first girlfriend who was aware that I consciously chose to discount my intuitive insights, and this goes far beyond relationships. Another consequence was that just as I set the bar high for the idea of being in love, I also set it, well, infinitely high for the prospect of anyone being attracted to me in that way. This is quite a depressive thing to do. There’s also the issue that in a sense, initiating a relationship is a bit like applying for a job. That’s a horrible, soulless way of putting it, but it means that the analogy between ruling out the possibility of a relationship and ruling out the possibility of getting a “proper job” means that from that point onward the idea of successfully applying for one went out of the window. It’s also been said that the prospect of starting a relationship is the opposite of getting a job, which I have to say I don’t really understand. To me, it seems there’s a clear parallel between dating to see if you are compatible and going to a job interview to see if you’re a suitable potential employee. I also internalised the negative messaging people around me were giving me, making me feel worthless, irreparably damaged and a nasty person to be around, and that’s not a good attitude to have going into a job application. I’m also unaware of any of my strengths and weaknesses, which is probably also connected.

Now in theory I could get over that. However, as I age there are various consequences of having adopted that attitude long term which means that it’s now probably a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is basically a massive domino effect from this single misunderstanding, or whatever it was, from the age of eighteen, and no feedback is possible from it because Vicky and I haven’t been regularly in touch for thirty years. It probably isn’t even worth trying to fix, because the problems are now systemic in my life.

It is important not to over-estimate the influence of this experience on my life, because part of the key is probably not to be that person. It’s possible to get over all of this emotionally, and in fact I have, but I believe I can still see the consequences.

There is a more peculiar consequence of all this: I am not metaphysically naturalistic. Because I had the dream in 1983 which appears to predict me meeting her, and the “instructions” to go to a particular place at a particular time to encounter her and attempt to resolve the situation, I believe that there has to be something going on psychically under the surface. It could also be that if I did trust my intuition, I would have picked up on many examples of this happening. But it puts me in a fairly unpopular category of being a philosopher who believes in the supernatural. If I didn’t, I’d be ignoring those experiences. I don’t know what to make of them. For instance, it could be that this was just a spirit messing with my head for its own purposes or just for none, and even saying that makes me doubt my sanity. But one can be both sane and accept the existence of the supernatural. Because of these two incidents, it may have been harder for me to lose my Christian faith and it probably makes it more likely that I’d be theist. But I cannot for the life of me account for these incidents naturalistically and it seems perverse to do so.

Finally, I want to reassure you. I did eventually meet Sarada and we got married and had two children and have now been together for twenty-eight years. I am not by any means hung up on this person I haven’t seen for decades, which is quite fortunate for me as my work in the group demonstrated that many more people still are after many years. Anyone who knows us offline, and maybe even online, will be aware that we love each other deeply and are utterly committed. The Vicky incident hasn’t have long term effects in that way, but in other areas it has. The healthy thing is to get past this, but I still wonder what would’ve happened if I hadn’t met her. I strongly suspect there would either have been another “Vicky” or some other non-relationship issue which would have blighted my life in some other way. After all, I have the personality that I have, and maybe some things are just inevitable.

A Skyline Campus

It’s been suggested that I give an account of my experiences at the above place, so this is it.

Back in the 1980s, I seem to recall that something like two to five percent of people in the UK went to university or polytechnic. It wasn’t the ubiquitous stage which people expect today. Prior to going, people made the observation that it was practically my natural habitat, and I still think that’s true, at least as far as 1970s universities were. Tempering this, it’s only fair to point out that a university education, at least at the time, mainly fostered a particular variety of learning and intelligence which is simply a variety of that rather than one which has priority over other kinds, but because academia is substantially responsible for forming dominant notions of what constitutes intelligence, this is what we tend to end up thinking is “the” intelligence.

For the few years before I got there, university didn’t at all seem inevitable to me. The actual institutions I chose initially included Stirling, St Andrews, Warwick, Bristol and Essex – Oxbridge was a non-starter for practically anyone at my school although there was one pupil in the year above me who did get there – but I then scrapped that list and applied to Keele, Nottingham, Reading, Exeter and Sheffield, along with NELP, Oxford Poly and Hatfield. Exeter rejected me by return of post and I only got offers from Hatfield, NELP, Keele and Sheffield. The choices of Keele, NELP and Oxford Poly communicate my aim to study a broad range of topics rather than go for single honours, because I had been pursuing an attempt to go for as wide a range of subjects as possible at school.

My aim for university was neither vocational nor academic, but primarily focussed on the opportunity for political activism and becoming independent of my parents. Being born in late July, I was one of the youngest people in my academic year and I felt at the time that my mother was over-protective, although given her history I don’t judge her for it. 1985 was the year of the Live Aid concert, and bearing in mind that I was quite naïve at the time I expected this to be instrumental in addressing world famine. During the summer, while I was working on a strawberry field in a farm near Canterbury, the pirate station Laser 558 was constantly playing Power Station’s cover version of the Isley Brothers song ‘Harvest For The World’, and for me that summed up why I was going and the vision I had for the future. You can’t really overstate the importance music has for people of that age. This was before I was vegetarian and I concentrated on human needs rather than those of other species, not realising that they were indivisible, so it was very much about a just distribution of resources according to need. I also had a very non-religious outlook at the time, which was shortly to change. I also started to apply the year ‘Threads’, the post-nuclear Holocaust TV drama, was broadcast, and that scene at the beginning of Ruth and Jimmy conceiving a child in a car on the hills over a dingy, overcast Sheffield seemed very exciting to me – these big industrial Northern cities with their rain, greyness and cooler climate somehow represented my future very positively. It was this desire to go somewhere less affluent and in a bubble than a small city in Southeast England which influenced my interest in Scottish universities and those in the Midlands and the North

My A-level results were disappointing. To be honest I’ve never really got past this. I still feel overawed by Sarada’s A-level grades, for example. I don’t understand how people managed to achieve such high grades and it seemed completely beyond my capabilities at the time. Consequently, I didn’t achieve either the points or the grades to get into my university of choice, Keele, and went through clearing. This is one of those pivotal moments which amounts to a butterfly effect. I started to phone universities to look for offers in alphabetical order, considering Combined Studies as it had a lower entry requirement and was, again, broader than single honours. I had gone through a process of considering Philosophy and English, then Philosophy and Psychology, but the former I rejected when I realised how abysmal my understanding of literature was. Psychology I chose, like so many other people, because I hoped it would help me understand myself, in particular my queerness. At the urging of my friends, I rang a series of other universities until I got to Leicester, and managed to get in. My Plan B had been to get work at the local mental hospital and take a year out.

Hence on 29th September 1985 I took the train to Leicester, a city I would live in for the next thirty-two years. I’d never physically seen the place before and knew next to nothing about it, even where it was situated in England. I had no idea it was in the English Midlands or that Adrian Mole was set there for example. However, two years previously I had had a kind of precognitive dream about the city, which included some of the buildings I was later to become familiar with, including the railway station, the building next to it, Elizabeth House, the post office admin building next to that and the Engineering Building, which is on the left hand side in the top photo and which I considered to be the ugliest building in the world at the time, although it won an award. Thus I found the city startlingly familiar, and this is not confabulation because I wrote the dream down in great detail at the time.

I had opted for Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology, and stayed in Beaumont Hall, a hall of residence in the fairly distant suburb of Oadby. My first year did not go well. I failed to join any clubs or societies because I was too shy, and a major problem was that I was pining after a woman I was infatuated with back in Canterbury. My academic performance was, however, not problematic. I didn’t make many friends, with the exception of one guy called Keith who was very much on my wavelength. The big issue in my first year was that the hall of residence was home to a fundamentalist evangelical Protestant sect called the Navigators. Now you can look at their approach in two different ways. From their perspective they were rescuing people from damnation by packing out the hall of residence with their variety of Christianity and ensuring that no other voices be heard. There was also an element of notches on the bedpost of how many converts they could get, which was not healthy. From an outsider perspective, they were praying on emotionally vulnerable young people to get them into a cultish environment. The Navigators are not a clear-cut organisation which can be neatly slotted into the pigeonhole of a cult or non-cult. Individual members might have cultish approaches to things and others wouldn’t have. Life is not generally as simple as that.

In my discussions with the Navigators, I described my spiritual beliefs as that there was a God, and that God was good. You should probably bear in mind that my spirituality was strongly influenced by the thought of Olaf Stapledon then and now, and that my view of God was that it was rather aloof but still worthy of worship, and was most emphatically “it” rather than “he”. I should also mention that I’d recently completed an A-level in RE, something which had strongly influenced my decision to opt for philosophy at university. Therefore, I wasn’t going into this naïvely and found their attitude to be a little patronising. They had a particular view of Christianity to promote, to the exclusion of all else, which was pretty much your bog-standard evangelical Protestant stuff, and they weren’t above deception and emotional manipulation to promote it. After a very short period of time, I made a commitment to Christ, at around 10 pm on 23rd October 1985. It was a Wednesday. I have stood by that commitment ever since, although it’s waxed and waned, and my view of the nature of Jesus has changed. I fully acknowledge the manipulative nature of their approach. Prior to making this commitment, I had said to them that I would have a lot of questions which would make it difficult for me to continue, and they encouraged me to continue to ask these questions.

Becoming Christian was probably one of the most oppressive and depressing experiences of my life. It made me feel like all my options for my future had been closed off to me, and that I was trapped until death. That said, I did get to know a few people and make friends, and I was very impressed by the incredible atmosphere of love which was clearly present in gatherings of the people concerned. I decided to shelve my issues for the time being, in the hope that I would find answers. This went on for three months.

At the beginning of the second term, I decided to assert myself on the issues which concerned me, such as intolerance of other spiritual paths, sexism and in particular homophobia. I found that the other Christians I knew at university were not in fact keen on answering this issues, and in fact didn’t have the open attitude towards them I’d been led to expect. Some of them were also shockingly materialistic and acquisitive. I had felt that there could be a trade-off between the bigotry and anti-materialism, but in fact there wasn’t. Christians that I knew through the Navigators were in fact often quite concerned about financial gain and consumerist frippery. As I’ve mentioned before, it seems very clear to me that homophobia is intuitively wrong and that there are no valid objections to homosexually expressed romantic love between consenting adults, and the alternative is as absurd to me as the idea that two plus two equals five. They were completely recalcitrant on this issue and would not budge an inch on their bigotry. I’m not going to fixate on this issue this time because I’ve done so elsewhere, but really, you can’t tolerate any belief system which is compatible with homophobia.

Over my second term, I was also studying practical ethics and becoming steadily persuaded that I could not ethically continue to eat meat, so I became vegetarian on the 9th March 1986, as a transitional state to becoming vegan later. However, I didn’t actually tell either my Christian friends, who disapproved of it, or the university, meaning that I had to keep throwing away the meat on my plate I was served in the dining hall. I also wrote my first dissertation, on the subject of Islamic societies and the Great Transformation. I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with psychology because of its extreme emphasis on statistics, although that has later proved very useful in other areas, and when I found out there was a six-hour stats exam in the second year it clinched it, and I gave up the subject and transferred to single honours philosophy from the start of my second year. But by that point the damage was done.

Over the course of the first year, although I was still fixated on my friend from school, I became increasingly aware of a woman in my philosophy and sociology lectures and tutorials who looked remarkably familiar, as if I’d known her years previously, but whom I couldn’t quite place. This is of course the famous Vicky, who anyone who knows me personally will be aware of. I found the image she presented very off-putting and at odds with her personality, as she was very careful to present herself as stereotypically attractive. She wore contacts, bleached her hair, waxed her legs and so forth, all of which at the time seemed to me superficial and an excessive concession to patriarchal standards of feminine beauty. I would never dream of being so judgemental today, but this is back in the era of the boilersuited shaven headed butch lesbian separatist stereotype, some of whom were quite judgemental about the appearances of other women. That said, on some level I would’ve loved to have done the same myself, so I think to some extent I really wanted to be her. I found her intelligent, witty and engaging, and she seemed to feel the same way about me. I was however concerned that I should remain loyal to the woman I had a crush on back in Kent, and it also occurred to me that Vicky was so conventionally attractive that she was bound to be in a relationship and therefore not an appropriate person to feel this way about. I thought I’d got to know her quite well, as we tended to work together and she went to the occasional philosophical society meeting. I definitely perceived her as being interested in and attracted to me, although I couldn’t understand why, and I also couldn’t understand why she never seemed to mention any significant other. People do the “boyfriend mention” very early on in such situations normally, but she didn’t do this. And there’s another aspect to this which you may find hard to believe. You know that dream I mentioned of Leicester two years before I came? Well, she was in it as my partner and was also a Greenpeace activist. As I say, I was careful to record this dream in detail in case it later got distorted and elaborated as memories often are, and I can assure you, Vicky is in this dream. I should also mention that I die in it.

In the final term of my first year, I managed to break free from the Navigators and start to live my own life. At the same time my friend in Canterbury was having huge emotional difficulties with a man she was in love with, just as my interest in Vicky was starting to get out of hand, so immediately after my last exam I went back to Canterbury and visited her. She said she was glad to see me, and I may be wrong but I think this could just have been another untaken path, but I’ve seen where it would’ve led and it didn’t involve either her or me being happy. Nonetheless I do remember taking the decision not to pursue it but to remain friends. Whether the option was there or not I don’t know. We’re still friends.

After a few days in Canterbury, I went back to Leicester and started to get involved in political activism. I noticed that someone had put up the contact details for Canterbury Green Party on the bridge noticeboard to the Attenborough Building and copied them down. They were involved in a campaign against the Channel Tunnel, hence the rather surprising location of their details in Leicester. I then became aware that I needed to inject a bit of reality into the situation with Vicky. I was concerned that because of her conventional image she would have equally conventional values and political beliefs, and this couldn’t be part of my life. Then I realised that she was campaigning on behalf of a Green Party presidential candidate for the NUS, and at that moment I realised that as well as being intelligent, generally a sympathetic person and the like, she also had the same political perspective as me. It later transpired that it was her who stuck the Canterbury Green Party address up on the noticeboard. Unbeknownst to me, she had also decided at this point to tour Europe. If she hadn’t done that, I could’ve resolved the situation much more easily, but the problem created by this was that she was nowhere to be seen and I didn’t expect to resolve the situation before the start of the next academic year. I was acutely aware that this could turn into an unhealthy obsession if I didn’t manage to do this.

Then something weird happened. On the evening of 23rd June 1986, I was in my bedroom at Beaumont Hall and was effectively told that if I went to the gates between Queen Mother’s Walk and the University at 9:33 pm, I would meet Vicky and be given the chance to resolve the situation. Basically, it wasn’t a voice in my head so much as a sudden revelation of a series of instructions. Rather freaked out by this I followed them to the letter and it worked! I can’t account for this, or the dream. All I can do is assert that these things happened. I do not know how. And Vicky was there. With her cohabiting boyfriend of five years whom she had failed to mention in spite of us having got to know each other pretty well. They even had a dog. So that was that. So people, for God’s sake do the boyfriend mention will you? And also, don’t shoot the messenger. These two incidents, of the dream and the encounter, did happen as I described them, and both are recorded in advance so I know I haven’t modified the memories. I am an assiduous diarist: I record everything. Believe me, this is what happened.

Unfortunately, although this did resolve the situation, by that time it was too late and I’d tipped over into full limerence. The day after, I left Leicester and went back to Canterbury for the summer.

Okay, I’m becoming aware now that this is going to turn out rather long, so I’ll summarise this and continue tomorrow. There were indeed a number of pivotal and influential events in my first year at university. Leaving home is of course one of them and I would’ve had that in common with many other people of my age at the time. Another one is becoming vegetarian, becoming Christian, having difficulties with fundamentalists and meeting and falling for Vicky. A major secondary strand was becoming a member of the philosophy department staff-student committee and campaigning against the closure of the department.

More tomorrow then.