Mems

Collecting up stuff from childhood

YouTube (childhood account)
This has a little sample of goofy stuff I made when I was small. I also have about 45 mins of condensed ADHD from age 10 in which I yell into a mic about nothing

Homework
Year 3 to 13 🙏. I got onto MS Publisher early doors so my homework always looked way better than everyone else’s lmao. Peaked with that DT coursework for sure. Also quite enjoy reading my childhood takes on Israel and economics crackpotage

Visual Basic
VBxpr is my childhood Visual Basic project. I think my first program tho is the jokes quiz about cycling in my year 6 homework. It was commissioned as like part of an extracurricular scheme to advocate cycling but never made it to its school assembly premiere cos the (then-4-year-old) .NET Framework wasn’t fucking installed cos 2006 was still the days when nothing was compatible and/or worked and I didn’t have admin access. The grown-ups let me down man, I never forgot

The selection of background images was strictly (some of) the classics – Autumn, Azul and Bliss. This was before GitHub, when everything was a Visual Studio “solution” with a thousand files, so I just left it as a OneDrive repo above with the EXEs at the top.

Flash
(The best way to watch these is using this flash emulator. I was hyped about making websites in FrontPage back in year 6 (like Publisher, shit was just very child-friendly) and probably got the idea from my FrontPage book or smth to check out Flash. Flash was all Professional and I found it mega-hard to learn, but eventually made some goof (I branded them “twirk411” back then after my Piczo site, whose handle was a troll of “twirl411” which belonged to my girl friend :) ). A year later I somehow put some peers onto it and they fucked about making, like, this

Is this happy-slapping? (Everything I have is happy-slapping lmao). The slow fade into red outline at the end kills me

Maps (Visio)
I drew maps a lot as a kid. Most are sitting in a box in my room, and some are electronic, done in Visio. It’s pretty shit but I failed to find anything better at that age (10–14), and I did try. The most notable Visio projects were the “Filip 1” town I made up, the London Tube map, the Paris Métro map and the National Rail map marked “UK”… the latter was kinda my big project, incomplete (unlike the others), but I used the process as a kind of way to explore England as I laid down railways bit by bit

Love

For me, love is a rather vicarious feeling that I suspect isn’t real, but fear I may be swallowing a bitter pill by considering my own experience as being representative of everyone else’s. I felt by the end that love was more of a suspended disbelief necessary to function as a person, one that my social skills weren’t up to the task of suspending

So I wish to link some of the things that made me feel this vicarious warmth. I’ve written down a lot of my own childhood stuff on this page to help, and my music page is also good for it

‘I’ve been good and bad, caring but useless’: my first year of university was extremely heavy, characterised by a mental repression in all of my friends that stopped us from being present cos we were so drowned in work. Cambridge was meant to “tear us apart and rebuild us”… but that second part was just cope. Amid this, I got homesick, and picked up this column by a school peer’s dad, to remind myself of home. They were very pointless but also lighthearted, gentle, perspicacious. The one I picked here is about completing the journey of raising children, particularly about death, teaching and failure. The guy’s band’s music is also very moving in that nostalgic romantic way

Linkus and Sarcrai: in the early days following the fallout of lumardy manipulating me out of our friend group, I felt it in my sense of identity, as an English SMS speedrunner looking up to those who came before me and wanting to feel like we were a team. But for those of us who came to support each other during our first runs, there were some to whom this meant nothing and it was worth trying to eliminate someone. I’ve found it futile to get past this feeling of betrayal and cognitive dissonance. This video of an SMS PB from Linkus7, 10 years old in 2024, ties together his inspiring me to start running the game back in 2018, with Sarcrai’s presence in the call. Both very young and from a hallowed period before my time, reminding me of being a child, the footsteps of my forefathers, and of the sense of community, of why I started in the first place

so that’s pretty nice!

School

I’ve been watching Lofe on YouTube lately to break up the depressing work I’ve been doing to get docs together. I picked him up just from seeing his tweets get likes from a couple of people from Mario speedrunning (specifically rays04 and Siemke), have enjoyed his introspective monologues, and he inspires me to also be a proud buffoon. So I felt it’d be fun to pick out a most-vivid memory from each year of school…

Nursery

You learn the high of power early in life. There was a row of PCs (CRTs, Windows 95/98, it having literally been 1998–99) with fun games for toddlers, and I’d learned some basics like how windows were minimised. The last PC in the row was aligned with a hole in the wall partitioning two rooms, on the right of the hole so that the escape key was right on the edge and within easy reach of my hand as I walked between rooms… I press it, spot the screen flashing as the game is replaced with the desktop, and crack a wry smile imagining the sheer confusion I left the 3-or-4-year-old behind me in. Knowledge is power, and it’s fun to be powerful :)

Special Mention

Standing in an island of seated children in awkward silence, having just shoved one of the teachers lol.

Reception

I remember doing some scrawling, looking at the date on the top-right corner of the page, and being very confused why I suddenly had to stop writing all those 9s and instead go 2… 0… 0… 0…..

Special Mention
This girl sitting next to me tried to write “I like the slide” but instead managed “I lick the slide” and I was howling

Year 1

I don’t remember much of year 1, mostly having it explained to us that we would be learning “literacy” and “numeracy” instead of english and maths, and some existential moments wondering about formal lessons and what that would be like

Year 2

My best friend at the time was the head of “Tiger Team”, cos tigers were his fave n dat, and our daily grind was roaming the playground investigating the new kid cos we thought he was a werewolf (cos he had a ducktail)

Special Mention

Did I or did I not trip Jamal? people still (Win Butler voice:) have their doubts about it. This memory is seared in my head cos I was forced to defend my innocence. But the kid literally sprinted up a flight of stairs right past me, tripped and cracked his head, and then everyone blamed me. The eyewitness reports he has eyes in the back of his head and so saw me put my foot out to trip him :). It’s jokes now but otoh his best friend from back then joined me in secondary school and still accused me of this in year 7, which I thought was insane.

Year 3

I remember there being a huge buzz when I showed up to year 3, cos I’d changed school but the new school was shit so I came back (sorry St. Peter’s lmao). Felt like royalty for a bit. I remember a maths lesson soon after I came back where shit was really hard for me and I had a crisis in confidence cos I was reputed as an excellent mathematician and this was the first time I found I couldn’t do something

Special Mention

Skanking on the carpet in our classroom with a boombox and a kid (Adam again iirc, unsurprisingly) who was bringing in all sorts of Parental Advisory CDs – I particularly remember Without Me from The Eminem Show, which had just come out. Ignition by R Kelly was also huge at the time

The photo of me from my third movie was from y3

Year 4

Year 4 English lessons were so, so calm. Some of my best poetry is from Year 4; I dug it up and got it published in the creative writing mag in sixth form haha. But my most vivid memory is drawing mobile phones, and managing to convince another kid to join me (in fact, the same one whom I’d supposedly tripped in year 2!). Phones back then were sick, incredibly creatively designed unlike the slabs of today. So we were drawing, like, my teacher’s phone, this lardarse, this beauty, and my friend was obsessed with this piece of shit haha.

Special Mentions

I remember I was in deep with bullying in this year, and I stuck my hand up when the teacher was discussing this in general, and she said “Filip acknowledges it”. Getting bullied at this age was absolutely my fault lol. I just “did what I wanted and said what I felt” to quote Adam above. I basically reasoned, if the boys are supposed to find the girls pretty, then I’m sure this works the other way round as well, so everyone is beautiful and we should own it. They just called me gay 💀. Honestly, I wasn’t at an age where attraction made any sense to me in either direction.

There’s another memory from either this year or year 5, but it involved my year 4 teacher, whom I remember as a witch who hated me. I don’t remember what I did but she grabbed me on the arm and pulled me down a flight of stairs while telling me I was a “liability”. Wild moment, can’t forget it. I also remember the beautiful words my ex-friend luke gave me when I told him this story:

what are people doing to kids man. they’re just little people. they didn’t ask to be here

Year 5

I got into some sort of trolling fight with some girls, and they were fuckin getting away with it ! So I plotted my revenge, and between lessons, I took out a water bottle and spilled it over one of them! … Who kinda, easily, stepped out of the way, leaving my water to hit and ruin somebody’s prized manga book. Guy was in tears. Don’t be like me; I was a cunt in year 5. I harassed a kid in the playground for weeks, having picked him out for being overweight, and I had no friends so nothing better to do

Special Mentions

Summer 2005 was when London’s successful summer olympics bid (for 2012) was announced. I remember the excitement was like nothing else… I and some others just outright sprinted down two stories of stairs. Maybe the first feeling I can pinpoint as euphoria

I also remember coming back from sport’s day one summer morning, being sat down on a carpet and told the 7/7 terrorist attacks had happened that morning. We were “double-digits” so we could handle being told that, I think we were told

Year 6

I remember fucking around with some props for a play we were putting on, and doing a dance with a foam rocket, wiggling my hips and the rocket left and right, and I distracted a girl who was talking to a teacher so much she abruptly burst out laffing. So making a girl laff is my pick :) This year was, probably still is, the best of my life, because I came into my own socially and was extroverted and confident, so had lots of these kinds of memories of hanging out mostly with girls on Piczo and Club Penguin, getting into video memes (on Google Video cos YouTube was less than a year old and blew up next summer) and that

Special Mention

[me:] in year 6 i was doodling in maths, decided to draw a town of shops representing everyone in the class. one was called Lacey’s Laces (low-hangin fruit right) but i put it on a massive cube right in the middle cos i was rly into the idea of a warehouse solely dedicated to shoelaces

Another memory I have is of sitting on a bench by myself next to a massive yogurt stain, contemplating time passing and the end of primary school, and having the same teacher who’d called me a liability pull up and sit down next to me, and start chatting about life. A few moments later, she realised she’d leant on the yogurt and started complaining, and I struggled to keep a straight face. Revenge at last :)

Year 7

Standing in my form room in the aisle by a row of desks, the endmost desk had a rubber stop missing so that it rocked forward. This kid ran across the entire row, trod on the endmost desk, which gave way and *blam* fell down and broke his arm right in front of me. Can’t forget seeing that. He was in a cast for a few months. The missing rubber stop was one of my favourite trolls back then (not saying I deliberately removed this one, mind!) because it was insane to me that someone could design desks for schoolchildren that would became death traps when the stop went missing. Shit just kept rolling over onto people, even when no-one was standing on top of it

Special Mentions
Year 7 was the year of buffoonery realistically, a nasty year of being bullied but one where I had a mutual respect with another proud buffoon. We spent several lunchtimes just putting random shit like whole-ass recycling boxes on top of ajar doors so they’d collapse on people. But my fave mem is one day after school when we ran trench warfare along a row of lockers, using the locker doors as shields while tryna go for headshots with whiteboard markers off spin throws. Another anecdote:

[me:] when i was in year 7 (age 12), the ds lite had just been released, and i remember noticing the crusty-ass og ds this kid at the back was playing fifa on alone at breaktime. he kept yelling to himself sporadically – as was the style at the time. meanwhile id just gotten this cutting-edge smartphone (coff nokia n73) and was taking full advantage running around all the time recording videos of random people for absolutely no reason. this other breh started getting mad pissed at ds guy’s continual yelling, so picked up the nearest object he could find, lying about our modern languages dept form room, and yeeted it at his head. cd included for scale. the initial flooring, chaos and lols subsided when someone noticed i was video-recording on my phone. everyone gathers round hushed to see the video. “you missed it.” what follows is ~5 of us degens running 10 mins late to next class shooting takes trying to recreate the event to, erm, “submit to @youvebeenframed for £250”. so now somewhere on the cloud i have multiple videos of a guy in a bike helmet pretending to play fifa while getting pelted with dictionaries

Year 8

My most vivid memory is standing in a street around Montmartre, Paris, with a group of boys who simultaneously ran away from me. I had dinner with the teachers that night.

Special Mention

It’s hard to revisit the year that realistically destroyed my social maturing, attitude to girls, everything. But it was also a strong year for buffoonery at least, and I remember being very impressed entering my form room one day to find somebody’s locker shelf had been caked completely with a pristine layer of urine. This was also the year “in da bin” was invented, the contact sport where the goal was to either get someone’s bag in the bin or prevent it, both by any means necessary. I remember there was a lot of discourse after the buffoon I mentioned from year 7 kicked someone’s bag over his head after he bent over, causing not one but two Innocent smoothie cartons to explode inside the bag

Another strong memory I had is returning from sport’s day, where I had just lost a narrow sprint to not come last in the 800m. I remember thinking, you’re 13, you could be like those other kids, if you put in the work, get physically fit. It just wasn’t enuff motivation cos of my lack of social ties, but it was a rare and bittersweet moment of lucidity I remember well to this day. Something that should’ve woken me up but didn’t

Year 9

My most vivid memory is definitely the masturbation discussion from the sailing trip that I wrote down in part 2 of the “boys under attack” entry of my sn diary (which should come out sometime soon but I can’t link yet for safety reasons). But since I wrote that down there and it’s quite a deep experience, I’ll give another proud buffoon anecdote here instead. A long story, this one:

Year 9 was the year of “Krakatoa”, wherein we charged up our hands and slapped people on the back as hard as we could. I started getting super pissed off when this James kid started doing this to me… he wouldn’t stop!! … so I outright slapped him on the cheek during a chemistry lab demo, with his glasses flying off in front of the entire huddle of kids, which was affectionately remembered as the “bitch slap”. He still didn’t quit for some reason. So next time he did it during lunch in our form room, I ran him down, caught his leg, and yeeted him into a pile of bags. He started crying for some reason (it was just some bags I swear) but that finally put paid to the Krakatoa saga

Anyway, I affectionately remembered James and his antics, so a few weeks later, I was rocking on a wheelie chair by the whiteboard, and had the inspired idea of graffitting James’s name onto the wall with the dirty whiteboard eraser. J-A-M… I realise the flaw in my plan of setting up James, shit was too obvious and too stupid. So I finished it D-E. JAMDE. Thought I’d saved myself, only to find that my impulsive decision couldn’t be undone, cos the board eraser crap didn’t come off. I was desperately scrubbing it with water and A4 paper lol

Teacher sat down the whole class, I sheepishly admitted it in private, and the wall had to get repainted lmao

Special Mentions

The same sailing trip as the discussion I mentioned, in fact involving the same guy and his friend, they bragged that they were going to “shower with the girls”. I followed them to the bath shed, only to find they were showering in adjacent cubicles by themselves on the opposite end of the girls. This trip was when I first noticed my chronic throat mucus condition. So I hawked comically loudly and spat, and then listened to them going “why did you do that” “no it was you” “no it was you” “no it was you”…

This trip, as well as the two trips from the next year, are the freest I’ve ever felt. I sat in a little laser dinghy with a guy who kept singing “I’m on a boat motherfucker”. He was a bit timid about it, whereas I sailed aggressively af in high winds and remember the boat rolling to 45° while I leant far out the opposite side to balance it. Eventually, I think it capsized, but I don’t remember if I fell in or if it was just the other guy. All I remember is him getting carried away freezing out of his mind 😈 and then I had the boat to myself ⛵ and maybe that was the freest I’ve felt

I have great memories of my form room (E5). It overlooked the high road, so we’d put stale food on the windowsill and watch it blow down. I rode around the wheelie chair a lot, remember once pushing off a pillar really hard and just rotating onto my back, getting laffed at by the girls. I remember practising tennis volleys against the wall behind the lockers after school. After a second wheelie chair was left in the room, I remember having a great game of chair beachball with someone, for the first and last time. I used to play with spaces in very physical ways like this, much more than anyone else did, and I’m very proud of that

The thing I remember best from tennis is early on, going to Will to Win in Chiswick, I was with the chair-beachball friend, who was a troll but a bit of a pussy about it. We walked past a tub containing a tennis ball soaked in dirty rainwater, and he became squeamish, like “eww I’m not touching that”. I lift it out of the bucket, dripping bongwater or whatever, and he suddenly becomes attracted to it and wants to take it from me. I stick to my guns, make a bit of space, and smash the ball with my tennis racket over the corner of the roof of the clubhouse. It lands in the adjacent court with a *thwack* and an “owwww”. The guy I hit (on the arch of his back) showed me the elliptical rainwater stain and gave me a solid punch for my efforts :)

I say friend but I remember being the only tennis player from our friend group whom he didn’t invite to a day at his private tennis club. I never had a clear picture of what was going on with these friendships. They were so fragile

Year 10

The rowing trip to Banyoles was freedom as well. I remember pulling into the dock in my double each sunset with the sun bouncing off the lake. I remember being stranded because of a volcanic eruption with the boats packed up, having to run around the lake in peace. It was a formative time for me musically in my life, so I had fun arguing with my friend about whether Rubber Soul or Revolver was better, and remember which songs I had stuck in my head (Locomotive Breath, Armenia City in the Sky, Wavy Waters from Wario Land TSD, and Sympathy for the Devil while pulling in after my first 7km run/walk). I also remember, of course, my double partner telling me being ill was more fun than rowing with me and that the trip would’ve been more fun without me on it. Most of the nice memories were forged by my own imagination in solitary experience.

Special Mentions

Rowing in year 10 was a very transition-into-manhood kind of experience. I explored new realms of psychology doing 30-minute ergs, bummed off a pre-race training session and got punched, gave someone hypothermia during that race cos of splashing from my terrible technique. I remember a kid constantly telling people to “man up” and then being chucked in stroke seat and pressed so hard that he quit rowing on the spot and suppressed the entire memory lol. I remember all the cool places I rowed in, above all Henley-on-Thames and going afterwards to catch a glimpse of George Harrison’s house

Same kid I just mentioned got involved in two crashes on the mountain biking trip; I saw the second one, with a cement mixer pulling up in front of him, him slowing down, gently bumping into it and falling down. The gentle bump was so comical I never forgot it.

Year 11

The handshake I received from my GCSE history teacher for turning around an E in mocks and a predicted B into an A* in the real thing. I had some real emergencies to focus on in my social life, unbeknown to me, so I ought to have compromised my academics more, but this was still the greatest comeback of my life and I worked mad hard for it so I’ll never forget it. A well-deserved handshake for the man who taught me what I know about the Palestinian struggle

Year 12

I and someone else who were meant to be at “community service” sitting with primary school kids after school doing nothing… both of us independently simply didn’t turn up and found ourselves looking across from each other at a friend’s garden table after a half-day, with him smoking weed like “wait where were we supposed to be?” haha. I only decided to start smoking a couple months after that, but at that point the novelty had worn off for them and they weren’t tryna encourage me to do it anymore. I had to accept that I was never really gonna be seen as their friend. But even then, I constantly made decisions that took me further away from people; I could’ve easily messaged them over the summer to smoke, but I just didn’t

Special Mention

Weird memory but very hard to forget. I used to swim between periods sometimes as part of an initiative to fix my back or something. Once I was getting changed after my slot, and some boys from the “prep” (primary) school that my school ran came to go swimming. One of them suddenly stripped stark naked without a towel, and I remember seeing his dick and thinking wow, I’d forgotten how different those used to look before puberty. I remember finding this so surreal because, firstly, I had never in my life stripped like that in a changing room even at that age (~10), and secondly, I was wondering who had fucked up for that interaction to be allowed to happen

Year 13

Compared to year 6, I felt this year was dark for me in hindsight, because it was overwhelmed by the sense of social failure and longing. My most vivid memory is maybe a bus ride to Chiswick after exam results had come in, to go meet up for a patisserie crawl abusing the free-cupcakes-for-an-A-at-A-level offer from Patisserie Valerie. One stop before I got off, an acquaintance from school got on, someone I’d wished I could hang out with and listen to vinyl and stuff, and I remember his scruffy demeanour, a quick chat, and never seeing him again. I tried to get in contact with him the following summer but failed, and I think he moved back abroad. I was told by someone I met a couple years ago (2022 iirc) that he’d said we’d gotten in touch, but we hadn’t, so I was sad

Special Mention

I enjoyed the vibe of maths lessons more than anything back then. My fave memory is maybe sprinting back into one after lunch having picked up a soft drink, vaulting the turnstiles to get into school and doing my knee in, then limping in and opening the shaken-up soft drink, holding it out over the desk as it foamed over and soaking someone’s blazer. Got clowned on for that one

Uni

I don’t remember much about uni, mostly the feeling of drifting around alone at 11pm trying to rest from overwork, learning to play on the piano stuff I listened to on Spotify on the college computers. I took a trip to Oxford to doss about late into the term before finals, mostly by myself cos everyone was ofc busy.

→ Days to Come: My favourite month of my life was the month after uni final exams ended. It was a turning point ending 6 years of overwork. It was marked by me picking up this Bonobo album, which I had heard once a few months earlier, knew I would love so decided to save the second listen until hours before the last exam. This linked page is my diary of what I did that month.

Lavatory Decorations

I have a funny email I received from college maintenance that’s revealing of the struggle faced by those of us who block toilets with the way we shit.

[To: Staircase 37 R.e.: Lavatory Decorations]

Dear all,

I understand that someone has decided to block one of the staircase lavatories with excessive loo roll, and to decorate it with twigs. I can not imagine why anyone would wish to do this however, I ask whomever this is to desist - the staff are quite busy enough without wasting time on such matters.

If the situation reoccurs I will refer the matter to the Dean as a disciplinary one.

Regards,
Shelley

Hey man, it’s not as bad as staircase 52 in 2013–14 where someone shat in a shower and left it there 💀.

Dreams

I wrote down a few dreams I had when I was younger. They’re always allegorical af so one can figure out what’s bugged me my whole life.

#1. 8/9/2014 | reproached naivety

I convinced myself that I was having a lucid dream, and immediately afterwards that I was awake, despite no evidence of either except perhaps vividity.

I inhabited an environment pieced together from pieces like the castle-like building from St. John’s, the sprawling meadow before it, the mounds and gym (which had been repurposed as a CATAM room) from Churchill’s fields, as well as a block of Novi Beograd-esque dark grey skyscrapers with very short floors.

I watched a video recording of Luke on a carousel [in the style of Hakym on a carousel] with people I didn’t know, and then teleported into the position of the cameraman stalking these strangers while being asked to identify myself and getting chased off.

I then returned to my reconstructed landscape, whose existence I anticipated based on vague notions of lucid dreaming.

I met Adam KH inhabiting the tower block. I was moving into the first floor, having considered how close to the rest of the landscape I wished to live, but needed something (as did they), so we left, ending up next to a stage, with him on it rapping assorted Beastie Boys tracks [cos “Adam” yeah…], followed by something set to Armagideon Time [not its first appearance in a dream]. He scrolled over to the other side of the stage gradually as his crowd grew; I followed him and others barked requests for him to return.

I found myself in trouble with Tout. He took me to the gym/CATAM room. I felt guilty for some reason, and was given the options of signing my name repeatedly or of explaning myself, neither of which were viable for some reason. Eventually, he gave up and invited me to wine, reasoning that it was my first time in Cambridge. Partway thru, Isla burst in, ostensibly to use the computers, but was immediately kicked out by Tout, rolling her eyes.

As I left the room and rambled thru the field behind Tout, I encountered a letter that I had supposedly written to him, listing as my favourite hobbies the use of ketamine and something else I’d never heard of, as well as listening to girls recite strange mathematical constants in a heavy French [imagining Nigerian] accent. I reasoned that this had probably pissed Tout off, but that it definitely wasn’t written by me.

#2. 13/9/2014 | misc

Complete hodge-podge of random crap.
Anong other things:

• A Wiki like effort to introduce people to American music. I took exception to a bastardised version of a Nevermind song.
• A landscape based on the greenery/obscure labyrinth in Chiswick [probably Grove Park], containing things I liked doing in places that required planning to reach.
• Michael: Failed tennis plan and surprise inclusion of my draft poem into ReDraft. Disappointing quantity of typos.
• Ellie: Described a morning routine of milk, cookies and freshly-rolled cigarettes (“I know; it’s terrible.”) We proceeded to identify people we both knew in Cambridge.
• Brian Eno ran a game with snakes that involved alternating guessing which snake is lying with something else where the truth was assumed. I was involved in some snake-related managerial role.
• Various people (from sec. school, in a sec. school-like assembly) could play guitar. Everyone bemoaned the triteness of the hired musicians.

#3. 13/8/2015 | dealer

The main theme of this one (as I remember it) was hurry up and find a dealer. I suspect the south side of King Street may have one [no prizes for guessing why] when my cousin points it out, coming up with these four Serbian code words I was meant to recite to him. They were weird words and reflected my current struggles with the language.

I start to see evidence of the dealer [who I think I modelled after Birkar (!)] when I somehow identify children’s presenter Barney Harwood as a big stoner [from the name?] who “was looking on in the background” of a newspaper shot of this guy getting arrested [maybe a reference to Gellért’s story].

Anyway, the dealer’s residence appears to be set in a Novi Beograd tower block, in the same place as my cousin’s flat, actually. I skulk around, thinking “I think there’s a library hidden in this building somewhere”.

I start to encounter people whom I interpret as being in on it – e.g. the NatSci circle, at night in among the concrete. At one point, I walk from one Novi Beograd-style park to the dealer’s park with Bonnet.

Also, a couple of times, I’m in a car with my dad/Jeremy Clarkson driving. I offer him some new-found joints and immediately feel remorseful, going to pains to point out paranoia or whatever. Between visits to his car, we manage to work our way thru a maze of European side streets.

It ends with my revisiting the dealer’s block and reaching his floor, but backtracking slightly into the stairwell, opening a curiously-placed door and finding the hidden library (more like a seminar room). In it are 5-or-so people; those whom I discerned were both people I knew asymmetrically. Oscar says “hey, someone came in”. I look around and rap a plaque on the wall reading “Smaug Tog” with my knuckles. Patrick sits in the corner with a label reading “Smaug” affixed to his head.

#4. 15/10/2016 | addict

This time, I imagined him as an expiring junkie. He was more aloof than ever, tho maybe even more communicative than before as he seemed without the energy to resist listening. I’d run into him in town, finding him being circled by his gf, who behaved similarly. He had long dirty hair and a deep voice, spoke candidly, laffed at my joke once, was mostly unresponsive. He seemed in control. Didn’t pick up on the topics I was floating in front of him, like my musical interests and limited means, dispassionately mentioning his own 500k income. She seemed more hysterical and struggled with her conceit that her latest intake was making the skin around her fingers decompose.

His gf went to the toilet in a shopping centre, but we left her there and went outside. She’d given me an ashtray-like pot concealing a tub. It was labelled “meow meow” in black whiteboard pen. I expressed confusion as to possessing it; he asked what the words meant. I speculated “mephedrone”; he reached out and tried to grab it. With an intent stare and naive eyes, and so it remained as he followed me outside, demeanour unchanged, watching me tokenly hide it beneath a low-hanging tree from afar. He systematically investigated the branches until he found it. I saw a squirrel in his place, eating the powder. It curled up with some spasming limbs. Looking directly forwards, it sharply inhaled and sighed into relaxation.

I didn’t get to ask him what he’d been listening to.

#5. 12/02/2019 | salami wrestling

Salami wrestling (suggested at hall, thanks mike p)

I stole pc component from Luke, Vatsal told me to put back (with grin). Wrestling some guy in bed, I win so drop him out the adjacent window. Try to lower him to break fall, realise it’s too high. Break fall on some kid; guy tries to limp away but the kids catch him and threaten him with guns. I go down and break them up; one of the kids starts shooting at me from distance as we walk towards some huge American discount store with safe-ish checkout line. I vaguely lob something towards the kid.

#6. 07/06/2020 | r swims

some boy I supposedly knew thru r, catz or such, was interested in rooming, had some sort of sexual motive. I let him down by saying my room has a public corridor thru it (which was supposedly true actually. I was oppressed af)

I hung out with r and c a bunch, as well as some “related” ppl I forgot. it had the same dreamy sparse abnormal vibe as usual. There was some context of an excursion by a cliff (which was based on the south bank still) with a holiday tour operator. r was tiptoeing on rocks, then had to fall in for some reason, swam underwater for long periods, then got rescued.

I went to visit him in hospital lateish as I’d been doing my own thing a bit while still watching, had to wrangle my way out of a resto. I walked into the others (l) on the way. r escaped me trying to hug him, even tho I was alone, no words, and I thought that was the end. we tried to stick around but were getting booted out by the tour operator, trying to wrangle staying but couldn’t cos of some terms and conditions.

I remember chatting to l about how to get back home… we turned out to be in Luton so I said thameslink. he thought crossrail would go there, be cheaper and more convenient. I said it’s nbd.

some ppl were discussing on my local pokémon go whatsapp group some important commemoration where u had to stand beneath fountains. alvin said he’d endeavour to stick around near some. I guess I thought it was any excuse to stick around and stay close.

c came thru to check in on me and provide some moral support, but then I woke up so idk what he said.

I brought mementos to all my friends’ foes,
Never stayed to talk, of course I went home,
As usual, they’ll see me at my funeral,
I’ll make that Walking Dead pose, a recluse,
but I’ve lived once, I bought a red rose,
I’ve been loved.

#7. 08/05/2021 | sarcronauts

the biggest scene is i’m caught standing there on king street watching some kids do some psychological crimes, and the police run me down and arrest me so they can get at my mind with electrodes so i can recall faces and other visual details. i’m chilling but they apprehend me with some massive spidery rake contraption. [this part is psychonauts themed i think]

after i’ve written a statement, my alter ego sarcrai starts replying to my statement, and we’re talking. and i treasure it for i may finally start understanding him and he’s no longer hidden – i hold the document up away from the police and start whimpering, and they console me

there are all these mario related parties my alter ego sarcrai has hosted. when smg was coming out, i threw a party in the pinna park funfair at night, with things like the flipswitch panels suspended in the air. i was gatsby or something. but it had a dark underside since my alter ego would murder people in a way that was hidden from me

earlier, i’d bailed from watching columbo cos i was too tired. it was a thing i was meant to be doing at home same time as my uni frens, and i’d extracted myself from a conversation with one earlier cos it was draining me. think it was also related to memory recall. i drank a soft drink to knock me out and put me into the universe where i was watching these kids on king st.

woke up with until the quiet comes (probably also dmt song, nightcaller) in my head. i went to fetch a link for that song and found this. we dream about our biggest fears

#8. 22/08/2022 | higher ground

the old news report was updated to include the sudden flash flood. i was at a high place in king’s college and most of the town got submerged, water coming up to me but leaving me dry. i started walking thru elevated citadel stone structures [trinity blue boar court] trying to find my way back. new parts of the college were revealed as the stone structures moved like magic. i found a way back towards churchill, tho the water level was receding the whole time, by heading out west over kings bridge and the backs, climbing the hill. I got to a vantage point at the junction of grange road and madingley road where i hung off a tree like a hammock, foot wedged on the trunk, and used my free arm to photograph the lay of the low land (town centre), still submerged (i had taken copious photos on the way hither, too, hanging back from evacuating too fast). i was asked how i completed the “any% run” from centre to here, on foot or by bike. i remember there being some Harry Potter themes/tourism, ig since cambridge has that vibe

the earlier part of the dream was about my house (sutjeska) being surrounded by a construction site during snowy conditions, as well as the loud albanian family from next door (neighbouring yard), whose kids played in my yard while everyone else was away. my mum told me how she was able to teach them some things while they were there

i also dreamt about exploring a Zelda-style world but being reluctant to continue playing. the sub areas were modelled over sms (“pianta” and “noki” regions/dungeons)

PBs

Travel
I used to race different travel routes to, err, cope with being overworked I guess? It was a bit sus cos I took a lot of risks with traffic cos I was so out of it.

Once I collided with a pedestrian… I was cycling on a mixed-use path that had ruptured into speed bumps (Burrell’s Walk), avoiding the bumps and so maintaining speed by crossing the narrow ends, whence I was unable to drift back into the centre and brake hard enuff to avoid her. It was low-speed on impact at least but yeah this is how I really saw my headspace at uni for what it was.

Some of my PBs were:

• 2:22.6 (05/03/13, run to school)
• 1:49 (31/10/2015, run to 3rd-year lectures)
• 7:02 (06/03/2015, cycle to 2nd-year lectures)
• 11:46 (27/02/2015, run to 2nd-year lectures)
• 9:36 (15/05/2014, cycle to 1st-year lectures)
• 12:29 (26/11/2013, run to 1st-year lectures)

I measured these door-to-door kinda, my house door to the form-room door for school and the door of each lecture room (Cockcroft, Mill Lane 3, MR2), except I normalised my various student rooms over the years by starting time as I crossed the façade of the Churchill porter’s lodge, so I had to fetch and lock up my bike (from inside the shed for security).

The 7:02 is the time I’m proudest of by far; it had perfect traffic light cycles on the route past Queens’ Road roundabout and Silver Street bridge, and I was mostly held back by my own leg lactic acid. I remember I’d just done an all-nighter for complex analysis sheet 2, so I guess it was a quest to feel something.

Sport
Some more-conventional runs I did…

• 11:40 (10/04/2015, 2.2km run, Furnivall Gardens ↔ Fuller’s Brewery Triangle)
• 29:51 (20/04/2015, 4.8km run, Furnivall Gardens ↔ Bandstand)
• 35:xx (~2010, 6.1km run, Hammersmith/Barnes Bridge loop)
• 7:45.6 (16/11/2015, 2km indoor row, r22, drag 4 on concept 2)

My fitness peaked late into year 10 cos I trained rowing.