sraffie reunion
PostPosted: Thu Sep 01, 2011 5:22 pm
i've been off work all this week, spending time with family in norfolk.
right now, i'm sat in the garden. it's really sunny; so i can see my screen, i've propped an umbrella against the back of my laptop, so i'm half in the sunshine and half in the shade. the battery doesn't last long, so i've fed the charger through the window to the plug socket in the kitchen. you have to make the most of the british summertime.
i've been sifting through the pub of heaven -- mostly the general discussion forums (um, fora?) -- to get a feel for what's happened since i've been away. looking at my previous posts, i don't appear to have been a regular patron of the pub since 2006, though i think i came back for the odd month since, here and there -- but the pub crashed a few times, sinking many of my posts, so it's difficult to be sure.
coming back now, it's a kind of post-voyeuristic experience, i guess. i'm shadowing old threads, silently reacquainting myself with the sraffies i knew when i first joined the pub, over eight years ago. i'm meeting people who joined since i left, people who don't know me, people who haven't met me. i'm reading topics a couple of years old, reading stories about people i don't know, about their families and friends and the food they like and they music they listen to and the clothes they wear.
and, since it's slightly uncomfortable silently haunting this place, i thought it worthwhile to speak out.
so much has changed. not that i should be surprised, perhaps. eight years is a long time for anyone, but when i joined (early 2003, i think) i was young and pretty naive and the pub of heaven was my playground, and back then, eight years was too far in the future to imagine. i wore my heart on my sleeve and shared stories and i played in our playground.
it's probably best that a lot of my posts sunk without trace in the forum crashes, to be honest. i seem to remember some of them (even some of the surviving ones) were cries for attention. (but we've all been there, haven't we?) and in the three or so years i was active here, things changed a great deal in my life. my first proper relationship ended shortly after i joined. i started my first proper full-time job. i made several friends on this board that i'm sorry to say i haven't kept in touch with, despite having met some of them in the real world, like kinders and nick. through this forum i met krissy, and we had an amazing, though somewhat challenging long-distance relationship for several years, back when the idea of sraffie couples was shiny and new. grandparents died and krissy and i went separate ways and i moved out of my parents' house and i grew up a lot.
and i think it's when i started to grow up that i stopped visiting our playground regularly. it had become like never never land; i had got to the point where my imagination wasn't as it used to be, when i realised i wasn't the bohemian revolutionary i thought i was. but that isn't as awful as it sounds. amazing things have happened in my life since my pub of heaven days. i have a whole new life and i can truthfully say that i'm happier now than i ever have been before.
so, haunting the pub over the last couple of days, behind the scenes... yes, i can see that things have changed. but that's not a bad thing. it's not a bad thing that sraffies have come and gone. it's a testament to philip pullman and his novels that the pub is still drawing new people in. there's no such thing as a golden age, just ages you took part in and ages you did not.
i'm glad i was in the age i was, at the age i was.
* * *
despite this, i do wonder about old friends. i wonder where they are, what they are doing now. a couple of them i have the means to contact, but many of them i don't.
i remember shiv's colour day. (and confusslement!) i remember the seating plan for the HDM movie premiere, planned years before the movie ever materialised. i remember when we voted and decided upon the name, the republic of heaven. (i remember dubbing it the pub of heaven, just to be awkward.) i remember eniamrahc's constant spelling-and-grammar patrol. i remember (and somehow miss) Yukon's trolling. i remember merlyn/tristan, justine, soup, eloquent/ali, lostinthought/louisa, enitharmon/rosie, blighty/will, lady/cecilia, trillian/tanya, amongst so many others.
i'm so pleased that peter, jess and soapy (and blossom, too?) are still here. but where are the others? i don't think this will ever happen -- i think some people have strayed too far from the pub -- but i'd love to see a sraffie reunion. i'd love to get all of the sraffies, old and new, all of us, together at one place and time, online or in the real world, just for one day, to see how we've grown, to see if we've gotten to where we wanted to go, to see who we've become.
you know. at midsummer, in oxford, perhaps.
spread the word, sraffies.
-- darren
right now, i'm sat in the garden. it's really sunny; so i can see my screen, i've propped an umbrella against the back of my laptop, so i'm half in the sunshine and half in the shade. the battery doesn't last long, so i've fed the charger through the window to the plug socket in the kitchen. you have to make the most of the british summertime.
i've been sifting through the pub of heaven -- mostly the general discussion forums (um, fora?) -- to get a feel for what's happened since i've been away. looking at my previous posts, i don't appear to have been a regular patron of the pub since 2006, though i think i came back for the odd month since, here and there -- but the pub crashed a few times, sinking many of my posts, so it's difficult to be sure.
coming back now, it's a kind of post-voyeuristic experience, i guess. i'm shadowing old threads, silently reacquainting myself with the sraffies i knew when i first joined the pub, over eight years ago. i'm meeting people who joined since i left, people who don't know me, people who haven't met me. i'm reading topics a couple of years old, reading stories about people i don't know, about their families and friends and the food they like and they music they listen to and the clothes they wear.
and, since it's slightly uncomfortable silently haunting this place, i thought it worthwhile to speak out.
so much has changed. not that i should be surprised, perhaps. eight years is a long time for anyone, but when i joined (early 2003, i think) i was young and pretty naive and the pub of heaven was my playground, and back then, eight years was too far in the future to imagine. i wore my heart on my sleeve and shared stories and i played in our playground.
it's probably best that a lot of my posts sunk without trace in the forum crashes, to be honest. i seem to remember some of them (even some of the surviving ones) were cries for attention. (but we've all been there, haven't we?) and in the three or so years i was active here, things changed a great deal in my life. my first proper relationship ended shortly after i joined. i started my first proper full-time job. i made several friends on this board that i'm sorry to say i haven't kept in touch with, despite having met some of them in the real world, like kinders and nick. through this forum i met krissy, and we had an amazing, though somewhat challenging long-distance relationship for several years, back when the idea of sraffie couples was shiny and new. grandparents died and krissy and i went separate ways and i moved out of my parents' house and i grew up a lot.
and i think it's when i started to grow up that i stopped visiting our playground regularly. it had become like never never land; i had got to the point where my imagination wasn't as it used to be, when i realised i wasn't the bohemian revolutionary i thought i was. but that isn't as awful as it sounds. amazing things have happened in my life since my pub of heaven days. i have a whole new life and i can truthfully say that i'm happier now than i ever have been before.
so, haunting the pub over the last couple of days, behind the scenes... yes, i can see that things have changed. but that's not a bad thing. it's not a bad thing that sraffies have come and gone. it's a testament to philip pullman and his novels that the pub is still drawing new people in. there's no such thing as a golden age, just ages you took part in and ages you did not.
i'm glad i was in the age i was, at the age i was.
* * *
despite this, i do wonder about old friends. i wonder where they are, what they are doing now. a couple of them i have the means to contact, but many of them i don't.
i remember shiv's colour day. (and confusslement!) i remember the seating plan for the HDM movie premiere, planned years before the movie ever materialised. i remember when we voted and decided upon the name, the republic of heaven. (i remember dubbing it the pub of heaven, just to be awkward.) i remember eniamrahc's constant spelling-and-grammar patrol. i remember (and somehow miss) Yukon's trolling. i remember merlyn/tristan, justine, soup, eloquent/ali, lostinthought/louisa, enitharmon/rosie, blighty/will, lady/cecilia, trillian/tanya, amongst so many others.
i'm so pleased that peter, jess and soapy (and blossom, too?) are still here. but where are the others? i don't think this will ever happen -- i think some people have strayed too far from the pub -- but i'd love to see a sraffie reunion. i'd love to get all of the sraffies, old and new, all of us, together at one place and time, online or in the real world, just for one day, to see how we've grown, to see if we've gotten to where we wanted to go, to see who we've become.
you know. at midsummer, in oxford, perhaps.
spread the word, sraffies.
-- darren
and will is on linkedin... 
