The Way We Are Now

I thought I would take the opportunity of my 200th post to do a little housekeeping and thus deal with something that has been nagging me for a while.

Today, at work, I nipped in the bathroom with the camera and took a few quick snaps of myself in the mirror.

So that's me there on the right, as of eleven o'clock this morning.

"Who cares?" You may well say and I suppose the answer is that I do.

I generally hate having my picture taken and go to considerable pains to avoid it. So, since I started blogging, I've been using a few pictures everywhere which were taken some time ago.

I started doing this without thinking too hard about it - the pictures were smiley and accessible and that is how I tend to see myself and thus that was the image I wanted to project.

All good.

But over time a very curious 'Dorian Grey' effect began to take place. In real life, I have been aging, gaining a little weight, going grey, getting wrinkly, but my online presence has remained firmly rooted back in his thirties.

This actually started playing on my mind a bit. I was looking at these online pictures every day whilst also being faced with the true facts of my own, not unusual, deterioration.

When the issue first arose, I saw it as something of a challenge. "I must work," I decided, "and regain the youthful features my lying online portraits are presenting to the world." And, in truth, this didn't work out too badly - I managed to shed quite a few pounds and the scale is still to this day creeping in the right directions. But we can only do so much against the ravages of time, can't we?

So, today, when somebody asked me for a photo, I took the opportunity to take this snap and I resolved to make this the subject of my bi-centennial post in an attempt to burn my virtual portrait-in-the-attic once and for all. I will go now and work through the places where I use my image online and update it and perhaps I will update you on how this little tweak plays out in my own mind in the weeks to come.

Can I just say again that I wasn't using the older pictures for any vain reasons - at least I honestly don't think I was anyway. It seemed to me that those pictures reflected in some way the wry outlook on life I secretly think I have. When somebody somewhere first commented that the face in the picture had a 'cute smile' nobody was more astonished than me - I really am *not* an oil painting in real life.

Now that I've mentioned vanity, and if I'm really trying to be honest here, then perhaps vanity does have some part to play in all this.

Look at today's picture. I could have taken a much worse picture than that. My story is that I wanted to emulate the older photo to see if any vestige of the old wry smile can still be detected. But the fact is that the poor light in that bathroom helps to conceal the deep pock marks left from my war with teen acne, my nose is redder than it appears here and I think I've got my chin lifted up a bit to try and reduce the effect of the few extra pounds.

I'm a little vain after all, I guess, and for no good reason.

But at least I don't look thirty-five anymore and, seeing as how I'll be forty-six next week, that's probably just as well.

Go Wuss, Young Man…

So, it’s official, I am turning into a Big Wuss.

It seems that, the older I get, the more emotional I get. Things which once rolled off me like a… rolling… thing that’s… on me (maybe I’ll come back to that simile) now seem able to wound me to the very core.

It’s a sign of growing older, I know it is.

See, when we were fourteen or so, this movie came out that was widely advertised as being the most heart-breaking motion piccie of all time. No, it wasn’t one of the famous ones like ‘Love Story’, in fact I remember it quite well. It was called ‘The Last Snows of Spring’ and it was pretty crappy by any standards.

But people did cry, maybe they felt obliged after all the adverts. In among all this cinematic weeping-and-gnashing-of-teeth sat us, laughing our heads off, joking, giggling and poking each other in the ribs.

This tragedy crap meant nothing to us. And why would it? We were kids, we'd never known any tragedy.

I believe that we are most touched by drama which deals with things which we have experienced ourselves.

It’s not a rocket-science theory really. Here’s an example:

When I was about seventeen, I put my hand through a window (‘long story, I’ll tell you sometime). You can sometimes get away with putting your hand through a window but pulling it back out again at speed is liable to do you some considerable damage and, in my case, it did. The other day, twenty-eight years later, I was admiring the scars which are still clearly in evidence around my wrist. The point is, up until I did that silly thing, I could happily watch people go through glass panes, in movies and on telly, all day long. Immediately after that, and for ever after amen, I have winced and shuddered whenever I see it happen. The experience had become personal to me to an extent that now I could be touched and even shocked by seeing it dramatised.

It’s true of pretty much everything, I think.

Take the only movie to ever make me cry, really blub like. Before I tell you what it is (and you pack up and leave) let me explain that the first time I saw this film I hated it. Really. Although the lead actor won an Academy Award for his performance, I found the whole thing forced and obvious. That was back in 1994.

Unimpressed. Deeply. Me.

Then I saw it again in 2004. I’ll tell you the truth, I saw the second half of it, on television, late one night. I hated it again, easy. That celebrated ‘Opera’ scene just does my head in (sorry Tom, it just does) 'load of old... but then the last scene came on… and it reduced me to a wreck.

A Wreck.

The film was ‘Philadelphia'. If this rings a bell with anyone, I did discuss it briefly before in the middle of a movie meme. Anyway this final scene shows (OLD MOVIE SPOILER ALERT) the family party after the main character’s funeral. On the TV in the room there are videos of the guy as a kid, playing around, looking sad. And that’s what got me. I had a boy the same age as this little dude in the movie. No matter how hard I tried, he would grow up and see the world for the harsh place it often is. The world would hurt him. It was beyond my control. And there it was - the life experiences that I simply didn’t have back in ’94 came up and kicked me right in the ass in good old ’04.

Oh and Neil Young’s moving soundtrack song possibly threw me off over the edge.

And now, as years subside, I can feel myself getting worse. I have more life experiences with each passing day, you see. More reasons to blub.

Just last week I was watching the last part of the BBC’s fine new adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank. Seeing Anne portrayed as a wonderful testy vivacious teenager, criminally robbed of her liberty and life – well, it spoiled my day. What really threw me was the information at the end which said that the only survivor of that hidden household was Anne’s father – who lived until 1980. What a weight that poor man he had to carry through his life.

When I was seventeen, I wouldn’t have got any of that.

But I think I’m starting to now.


(PS: Are there movies that have reduced you to a blubbering mess? I'd be interested to know)