MY B U R SA RY STO RY BY MICHAEL DOCHERTY (97-07)
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reminiscence on my time in the Junior School? No problem. After all, it hasn’t quite been 14 years since I first donned the blue blazer and travelled the 18 miles down the A189 from Ashington to Lambton Road. Hang on, though. That’s not right, is it? Try a terrifying 24 years. Perhaps readers of my generation have also begun to notice this strange phenomenon. Since hitting 30, time keeps erasing or compressing itself in my memory, so that leaving the Sixth Form in 2007 feels as if it must’ve been roughly a decade ago, but so does starting Year Four in 1997. There’s a paradox here: on one hand, I’m convinced that my days at school cannot have been as long ago as they were, but I am simultaneously aware that they have begun to recede in my memory faster than the hair on my head. Until a few years ago, my Junior School days still shone in my mind—for better and for worse—with sharpness and clarity. The memories had a level of detail by which I was assured that they were still proximate. Now, though, things are getting fuzzier. I forget names, specifics, dates. This is what nostalgia is: a perspective from which objects in the mirror are both closer and further away than they appear. There’s a deep sadness in that, one that I’m sure is familiar to older readers. I was grateful, therefore, for this opportunity, to put some recollections on paper before they lose any more of their shape.
