Hiding In A Shed In Croydon.

Or – Reintroducing yourself to your past...

Croydon - sort of...

A few days ago a stranger contacted me on Messenger. Unusually, she wasn’t trying to sell me a get rich quick scheme or suggest she had single-handedly selected me for a viewing of her ‘special’ selfies. No, this was an actual person, with an actual question: had I lived at a particular address, in Croydon. It was an easy one to answer – because I had.

My answer was not a surprise to her. However, I understood her need to make it a question rather than a statement of fact. A stranger telling you you lived somewhere that you did in fact once live, is what The People Who Need To Be Blocked Immediately, do.

You see, she and her partner had just bought this flat, the one I lived in. The garden was a mess of nettles and weeds (she sent me a photo) but they were clearing it. They had plans. They wanted to get to the scruffy, falling down shed at the end. When they got there (no doubt with the help of ‘God and ten policemen’, as my mother used to say) and prized open the rotten wood door, it was filled with the usual detritus that grows in garden sheds.

I imagine there was a pile of unused bathroom tiles, half empty tins of dried up paint, garden furniture held together by cobwebs and regret, and no doubt there was a little pile of charcoal briquettes too, trying to crawl their way to an improperly cleaned barbecue, festering in the corner.

I can’t be sure though, she didn’t say.

However, I do know there was also a plastic box. Not the sort you’d get from a pile on a pavement in the high street, next to a bin of mops and fake flowers. This one was hard black plastic. Substantial. How do I know? Well, she sent me a photo of that too.

But by that time, I didn’t need the photo, I knew exactly what she was talking about, because that substantial black plastic box – was mine.

‘We have a box full of your teenage life, here,’ she said.

Mickey Rourke - back when he looked like Mickey Rourke

She pinged me another pic. This one showed a diary covered in old Mickey Rourke clippings from magazines. Then she listed three female names. I recognised two of the names. I haven’t spoken to either of them for more than twenty years. The third was a mystery - I have no idea who she was or why I scrawled her name on the cover of my diary.

To put this discovery in context, though, I need to say that it’s been 15 years since I moved from that address. Heaven knows how many other people have lived there since. And not one of them ever thought of clearing out the shed?

Oddly, it was only this month that I thought about that very box, filled with old diaries. I’d been lugging it, or variations of it, around with me since the mid-80s. I remembered it, but couldn’t find it. And I’d no idea when I saw it last.

These diary box thoughts came to me in my spare bedroom office, where my desk is and where I write this blog. It’s so full of boxes of my stuff that everyone I’ve Zoomed since moving to Manchester has asked if I was talking to them from inside a cupboard. Rude.

I poked around some of the boxes but those diaries were nowhere to be seen. I concluded I must have thrown them away during one of the seven moves I’ve done in that last decade and a half.

Evidently not.

And I’m glad. Because these diaries are not the sort you write dentist appointments or family birthdays in. These are A5 page-a-day diaries, into which my younger self poured out every heart-wrenching thought from his messy head.

They catalogue a time in my life when I was obsessed with the passage of time. Seems so unlikely for a young man with so much of it ahead of him. Even so, back then I felt the need to fanatically record my thoughts and the happenings of every day. It was as though I was hoping it could all be preserved, like a mosquito suspended in amber forever. Or until Steven Spielberg came along, extracted its DNA and created a theme park with hordes of tall Mancunian clones running wild and trying to eat Jeff Goldblum.

Jeff being chased by clones of me

I wanted all of those days ‘saved’ in my diary pages. Saved for what? I have no idea. I don’t remember ever looking through an old diary to see what a different version of me was thinking back then. But having those diaries in an ever-heavier box, year after year, gave me some sort of comfort. Teenage Paul, early twenties Paul, other Pauls, were still there, living and breathing in that box.

If the diaries had been forever lost, I don’t imagine I would have missed them terribly. For fifteen years, my younger selves were shoved at the back of a shed in Croydon, and I only thought about them once before the kindness of this stranger so randomly unearthed them for me. But because they are now rescued from their captivity, I am excited to be reunited with these historical Pauls and with whatever words were important to them back then.

But do I actually want to hang out with these entirely different versions of me again? Or do I really just want to peek at them from a distance? They’ll be over there, still lounging around in the 80s and 90s, with remarkable hair and genuinely impressive alcohol tolerance. While I peek at them through a chink in the curtains of time, wondering if the fabric of said curtain could do with dry cleaning.

I was pondering this thought while walking through the impressive greenery round here in Tameside. Up here, it’s a much quieter life than London, a slower pace of life, and a life where strangers smile and ask how you’re doing. There are paths and dried muddy tracks and valleys you can’t access unless you are a teenager on a quest.

I often wonder what boy Paul would make of it round here. And there are times, on these long walks, where I briefly wish I was him all over again.

Not that I’m partial for a return to the acne or the exam revision or the romantic yearnings and awkwardnesses. But when I see a climbable tree or a fence guarding some mysterious pipe or decrepit building at the bottom of one of these ravines, a younger me might have gone right ahead and investigated.

Not anymore. No one needs to see me ‘getting into difficulties’ and being rescued from a tree by a fireman half my age. Not to mention the ease with which I might do myself a physical mischief.

More bothersome is realising that at some point in my past, I began to care what other people might think. Not a lot, you understand, but a bit. Let me explain…

When you see teenagers possibly ‘up to no good’, you might tut and think of a little light trespassing, a few discarded cans and some grammatically incorrect graffiti. But when a grown man is seen alone in exactly the same place as those teenagers, we have very different, often worrying, thoughts. We imagine he’s up to something insidious, possibly dangerous. He may be digging a tunnel from here to Hades and inviting all the legions of misery to come forth and destroy mankind. Rather like a Conservative Party membership drive. We want to call our children inside and go and check on the livestock.

And we’re way more likely to call the police than to imagine he’s simply revisiting a younger version of himself.

‘Growing-up’ comes with many benefits…

(I mean apart from the responsibilities; and the way the body ages; and the need to get up in the night; and the inability to remember how you did maths when you were a kid; and requiring regular news updates that never, ever report anything but misery; and not understanding how a bourbon cream can put half a pound on you and take a month to get rid of; and wondering why modern music sounds the way it does; and looking at your cohort not wanting any of them to be ‘next’, then realising if it isn’t one of them, then it’s you; and realising you own more books than you will ever read; and having your surgery’s appointment hot-line on speed dial; and the fact that now you actually know things, you’re no longer relevant enough for anyone to listen; and your need for social media screaming to actually have a modicum of logic in it; and realising you’re the only person who still says ‘modicum’; I mean, apart from all that…)

…but wandering in a wood pretending to be a Jedi Knight isn’t one of them. Neither is seeing a ‘Keep Out’ sign and, well, keeping out.

But if my teenage urges (no, not those ones) come to the surface and I want to climb that fence or see what’s going on down in that dale in the woods, ‘adulthood’ rises up like stomach acid and ticks me off for such a thought. I worry, immediately, that even though I am very definitely NOT up to no good, other people might think that I am.

It’s like when I walk through customs at an airport. I know my suitcase isn’t filled with cocaine and stolen diamonds, but as soon as I think that it isn’t, I have instant guilt that the customs officer might think that it is. The only thing that stops me being the most guilty-looking man walking through the green lane is that everyone else has had the same thought and we all look like we’d give Pablo Escobar a run for his money.

If, however, I chose to throw caution to the wind and decided to return to a boyhood version of me for an afternoon, I’m honestly not sure if I can remember how to do it. And if you have to wonder how to be a ‘youth’ again, you’ve already failed at it.

But you know what? Even though I certainly wish I had the limbs and energy levels of a younger me, I don’t really have any interest in returning to those times, even briefly. I rather like being me at this age. I like that I know who I am. I like that I’ve found my soulmate. And I like that I am perfectly aware (well, within about 15 seconds) of when I’m being a dick – a skill I’m certain I learned much later in life than I’m comfortable to admit.

That said, I am rather looking forward to sitting down with those diaries, opening a page at random and seeing if I intuitively scribbled a message, of sorts, to my older self, a kernel of wisdom, a forgotten lesson or surprisingly erudite anecdote. Much as I’d love for that to be the case, I’m steeling myself for the dribblings of an angst-ridden young man desperately trying to fit into his own skin.

Don’t get me wrong, the past matters, and I love dipping a toe in the fetid waters of a bygone decade – but I’m so much more interested in today. And tomorrow. Because those are days I can make a difference. Those are days I can grow even further into myself, be a good friend to myself and remind myself to be grateful for so, so, so many things.

It’s only because I’ve reached today, and am looking forward to tomorrow, that I can thumb through the analogous record collection of my past experience and remind myself I will always own a copy of The Queen Is Dead but I will never again have to be the oik who went out to buy it.

Happy days.