I often wish I’d kept a diary. I never have.
Well, not a proper one. I did write one for a week when I was at secondary school, which went into deeply unfortunate detail about a girl I fancied in my class. This would have been fine, if it was just for my own personal use. Unfortunately it was for homework, and I had to give it in to my English teacher at the end of the week. The details of this incident are far too embarrassing to discuss voluntarily, but let’s just say that when I got the work back, my teacher said that while the diaries were “too personal”, they were very entertaining in an “Adrian Mole” kind of fashion. I took this as a compliment at the time. It was only years later that I realised that when applied to somebody’s real life, rather than a satirical work of fiction, it… really was not a compliment in any way whatsoever.
Regardless, the fact that I’ve never managed to keep a proper diary has really annoyed me over the years. As somebody obsessed with when things actually happened, not being able to pin down key events in my own life is troubling. I’ve just never managed to fit the actual writing of a diary into my day. Finding the energy to do a half-decent write-up of the past 24 hours just before bed has never been something I’ve been able to do.
Instead, to identify the exact date of things that happened years ago, I have to piece things together in other ways. Like, for instance, what was on the telly.
* * *
1997 was not a great year for me, in what was becoming a bit of a habit of not having great years. By this point in my life, I had started skipping school. (Yes, people who wear glasses skip school too.) This lead to one of my teachers drily asking me about the “part-time schooling” I was indulging in.
It also lead to ridiculous situations. Mum left the house for work after me, so in order to come back home I had to leave, and then return once she’d gone. I also didn’t have a key to get back into the house, so before I left, I had to leave the kitchen window slightly ajar – not too noticeable, or it’d just be shut again. Then I’d come back home, and clamber through said window. On a few occasions, I even ended up hiding under my bed, breathing as quietly as possible, while my Mum came home from work, pottered about the house for a bit, and then went out again. I even ended up getting away with that one for a while.
But I couldn’t hide it forever. I don’t even remember how Mum found out. A school letter? A phone call? Regardless, suddenly she knew, and she was fucking livid. And as punishment, she forbade me to watch one of my favourite TV shows that day. Hello, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I even remember the episode I wasn’t allowed to watch: “The Visitor”.
Bad luck for me that it was a good one. Widely considered to be one of the best episodes of Star Trek ever made, in fact.
To say I was displeased would be an understatement. She didn’t understand, I needed to watch it now. No dice. No Star Trek that week, and that was the end of it. Out of all the arguments with my Mum, this is one I particularly remember. The visceral sense of unfairness. I didn’t mind being punished per se, but why did the punishment have to be missing something that I’d never be able to watch again?
I clearly didn’t predict the easy availability of Star Trek in years to come.
Still, let’s ask the obvious question: when exactly was all this? We didn’t have Sky, not at that point, so I was watching the BBC2 showings. Which means a quick search on BBC Genome reveals the date of the big fight: Thursday 1st May, 1997. Which makes sense: I was still 15, approaching the end of my GCSEs, just as I remember. Everything matches with my head.
But as I was remembering all this, something else clicked into place. This was one of the last times my mother had that kind of power over me. Oh, don’t get me wrong – I could and would be punished in the future. Two years later there was a drunken incident involving the living room door being kicked off its hinges, which means I am still banned from having parties at my Mum’s house.1 But in terms of stopping your kid from watching TV, that starts to become untenable once they leave secondary school. For all my gnashing and whining, I didn’t have to wait much longer for that relationship to irrevocably change – as it does for nearly everyone at that age.
Piecing bits of your life together through BBC Genome might not be the ideal way of doing things, but it’s better than nothing.
* * *
By the way, “The Visitor” is entirely about… parent-child relationships. Specifically, the love a son has for their parent, and the lengths they’ll go to in order to show it. That was the show I was forbidden to watch.
Sometimes, life is just stupid.
Seriously. That ban was never withdrawn. ↩