Another World, Another Time...

Here's a thing: I was just mulling over stuff in my head over a bowl of Peterson's Nightcap tobacco and marvelling at the loveliness of the Pyracantha that now festoons the ogee arch to the side garden, when, for some reason, a particular character from my past came to mind. The original spark for this stream of consciousness left me as soon as I focussed on the bloke in question, but there you go. I was a student on the Art Foundation course at Bournville School of Art, Birmingham in 1973 when I met this particular individual,  a mature student, who was seemingly ancient to my mind as he was twenty-seven years old [I was nineteen]. As a student he brought to the table much experience and life experience and outside knowledge, and to be frank, much cynicism and a rather cold and calculating approach to his time and study there, although leavened at times by a sharp, if somewhat cruel and deprecating sense of humour.

I made contact with him a couple of years ago via some abstruse combination of internet traffic and eventually emailed him to confirm that he was indeed he. I entertained a flurry of emails with him for a while, until I realised he was still as crude, dismissive and unkind in his attitudes to life and the rest of humanity as ever before; indeed referencing a couple who, although lost in time to me as friends now, were nevertheless good friends to me back in the day, and in a very offensive way: the woman a person I was at school with from the age of five and her partner a fellow student on my degree course. That someone could maintain such a shrill level of misanthropy and misogyny [and he was very misogynist in his youth] into his late seventies I found staggering. I simply cut him off: he's welcome to whatever world he inhabits, I just don't want to share it with him or his ilk. By the way, Bournville College was brilliant despite all that...