I’ve been thinking lately about how little I know. The flowers on my balcony wither without me even knowing their names. Convenience disconnects people from knowledge, we are immersed mostly in ourselves.

In this remarkable sequence from episode 11 of his groundbreaking series Cosmos (first broadcast in 1980), Carl Sagan all but predicts the rise of the Internet:

#carl sagan #cosmos #internet

I was 12 in 1990 and largely ignorant of the world. I grew up in the frothy, knotty decade that followed. There came a geopolitical awakening of sorts when I fell for an Anglo-Jewish girl on holiday in Tenerife in 1991. Later I remember writing her awkward letters expressing my sympathies as Saddam Hussein set about bombing Israel.

My sexual awakening came a year or two later – lying prone on my bed as a girl considerably older than me gently kissed my neck. I learned much later that she died in a motorcycle accident. My family and I were living in New Zealand then. We returned to England in 1993, our circumstances a little straitened. My first mixed school. Deep crushes. Longing. I began writing poems. The experiences of moving away and then home again in the space of 15 months had solidified a melancholic sensibility. Then I met a girl who I would be with for the next five years.

I dearly wanted this to be just a preamble to a visual stream that reflected some of the less determinate images that flit through my ramshackle memories of that time but I’m not that good at the internet. The shot above is an X-Files screen-dump – the baleful Pacific Northwestern treescapes are my abiding memory of the series. I spent a lot of time in my attic room watching TV, often staying up late to watch shows like Northern Exposure. My life has often been little more than a reverie.