In the best traditions of writers like Karl Ove this will not be a linear account. Sitting anywhere - at breakfast, in a cafe, in a waiting room, or standing anywhere come to that, I always get a little edgy if I can't find anything to read. This means I end up reading the backs of cereal boxes, packets of sugar, menus when I didn't want to eat, bus shelter adverts, the sides of vans, left behind newspapers and magazines that I wouldn't normally give house room or any attention to. Today it meant that I read the University of Sussex Alumni magazine while eating scrambled eggs with chilies, chive and smoked salmon - that should have been enough to keep my attention focused on eating, but I still have that addictive habit of wanting to cast my eye over some kind of text. Today I had to hand The University of Sussex Alumni. The University of Sussex Alumni magazine is a publication that I deeply and unfairly resent for its smug self declaiming mish-mash of smiling students or smiling people who once were students, all saying how really fucking successful they have been which has made them deeply grateful to Sussex, grateful enough in many instances to hand over the dosh in considerable amounts. Leaving aside - no not leaving aside the issue of how you might feel "grateful" to an institution that is nothing like it was in the seventies, is now a vast corporate enterprise, the likes of which we would have scorned from our lefty perspectives that long time ago, and which we would not feel "grateful" to, because it's just too big and anonymous a beast to be "grateful" to, and smacks of gratitude for the poorhouse soup. Nostalgic, wistful, angry, amazed, incredulous, now those are the feelings and emotions that people (well me anyway) might actually have. There was one tiny little bit of nostalgic memorabilia that did strike me, as I skipped my way bad-temperedly through its cheap but substantial matt pages( why are all these alumni magazines printed on a cross between cardboard and paper? Do they think that way we will keep and treasure them for ever?). It was a memory (spoilt by a punning headline so bad that I can't even repeat it here), of being able to hear cows from the East Slope residences, in 1975/6 my first year at Sussex. It instigated a gush of nostalgia that made me feel breathless and inescapably frightened of death, like the nightmares I have where I can't breath, because I spent such an intense and beautiful summer on that gorgeous campus, with its rooks cawing, its honey bricks , its idyllic pastoral setting, sweet scented air, my first proper relationship with a fresh faced and beautiful girl, blonde hair and blue eyes. It was that endless hot summer of'76, and like all endless seeming summers the grass went brown and it was all over for ever. I got glandular fever, plunged into clinical depression, lost all sense of where I should be going and what I should be doing. Well nothing new there - and of course it's not the whole story, but that little reminiscence made me literally feel ill with nostalgia -ahh what a poisonous emotion it can be.
PS. The damnedest thing is that without Sussex I wouldn't be the fairly successful person that I am, I'm sure, but gratitude, gratitude is something I reserve for people, not institutions. Anyway, Bretton Hall was the best place I ever went to, although, although when I think about that long hot spring and summer at Sussex, I am, fuck it, I am grateful it happened.
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