1312: Hoarding

Occasionally I look around and wonder why I keep some of the crap I do.

I’m actually not that much of a hoarder — I’ve been fairly ruthless about throwing useless crap out on several occasions, usually when moving house — but there are some thing that, over the years, I just haven’t been able to bring myself to part with.

One of the things that’s stayed with me for over half my life now — well, several things, really, if we’re being picky — is my old school work. Not all of it — reading through old school books would make me cringe — but some of it. Most notably, I appear to still have most of my coursework assignments from A-Level Sociology (and possibly GCSE Integrated Humanities, too), all my course notes from A-Level English Language and I even found one of my GCSE (or possibly A-Level… I forget) Music compositions the other day — a piano piece called “The Storm” that I momentarily contemplated giving a French title (“L’Orage”, which I’m not even sure is grammatically correct) before mentally punching myself in the face with a silent admonishment to not be so fucking pretentious.

The aforementioned English Language notes actually moved binders during the course of my studies, but I still have the previous ring binder they were in before they got a bit too… big. Said smaller binder was decorated on the inside covers by my friends and I (mostly me) with a series of fake classified advertisements, many of which are in-jokes that I can still remember but which, going by past experience attempting to resurrect them with my old school friends, are probably remembered by only me. For example, I can remember exactly whom the advert “Ninja Assassin Wanted to Eliminate Annoying Twat in English Class” refers to; likewise, I remember who the phone number for the adjacent “Ninja Assassin for Hire” panel belonged to. Other jokes are a little more obvious: an advert inviting people to acquire fake identification to get served in pubs by writing to the local police station (postcode PE19 999, obviously); an advert for a new book called “How to Use Windows 95 Without Getting in a Stress” (judged “indispensible” by the Daily Mail, apparently); Poppets offering a new “Rabbit Poo” flavour.

Interestingly, the inside cover of my English Language folder also marks an instance of Capitalising Things to Make Them Sound Like Official Things that predates TVTropes by a good few years, and also displays a convincingly large amount of evidence that I held some sort of deep-seated grudge towards Cambridgeshire Careers Guidance for some inexplicable reason. It’s also quite magnificently dated by the references made throughout the adverts — the ad for the fictional PC product Mr Volpe’s MATHS! Is Not Boring… Honest proudly boasts of “16-bit colour video starring Mark Hamill and Patrick Stewart” and “music by Oasis” along with the fact it’s “powered by Id’s Quake Engine”; meanwhile the Hanson Interactive CD-ROM apparently came with “tickets to see Hanson live, a working sniper rifle with live ammunition (for use at concert) and actual footage of band members being dismembered horribly” (with no apparent realisation that if they’d already been recorded being dismembered then there’d be no-one to shoot at the concert).

It is, in short, a rather eye-opening glimpse into my psyche from when I was around 15. I’m not sure it’s a healthy image, but eh. It helped make me the person I am to– WAITAMINUTE