My cute, curvy Cuban friend Jossie (what kind of name is Jossie anyway? Is it a nickname of Josalyn?) recently posted a picture from her childhood. She told a sad tale to accompany her salad days photo from a school yearbook; a tale of her mum oppressing her wishes to look less like a floppy-haired, goofy blood clot (my description, not Jossie’s — don’t hurt me!) Not one to miss an opening, I thought I would share my childhood woes: the struggle and strife, and life, of a bowl-cut Beatles lookalike.

Unfortunately the haircut was not fleeting. It stalked me ruthlessly throughout my formative years, with my mother only allowing me to grow it after my 16th birthday. To this day I’m still haunted by brief visions of John Lennon out of the corner of my eye when I look in a mirror. Perhaps it was a rite of passage: become a man, develop body hair, lose my virginity, and stop looking like a poor, podgy, pudding basin child. My mother swears she wasn’t doing it out of spite, or some kind of cruel and unusual punishment. She also denies a childhood infatuation for the Beatles.

In actuality, I think my curse goes back another generation, to my grandmother. I’ve seen photos of my mother as a child, and she has the exact same hair cut as me. The contagious nature of nurturing!

While other parents beat their children, continuing the chain of abuse from their parents, my mother abused me mentally, with a formless and floppy coiffure.

Why am I making such a fuss about a haircut? Well, the clue was in the title — my haircut was really the only thing that plagued me through my childhood. Mind you, I didn’t have a girlfriend until I turned 18, and that sucked. I was always the one looking on and sighing wistfully from afar. I wish someone had told me back then that girls like guys to be confident and go-get-’em. It was only after I left school that my sister informed me that all the girls I fancied had a crush on me. I think that was the saddest day of my life, knowing I’d missed out on kissing some seriously beautiful European girls, and that I might never get a second chance. Thinking back, maybe it was the hair that scared them all away when I got close… Damn you, mother.

I was also bullied for a year or two, which caused some self-esteem issues throughout school (and was the main reason I never had the balls to ask a girl out). It was stupid, being bullied for being the brightest kid in school — and having a stupid hair cut (Damn you, mother!) Really, it’s depressing that such groups of people exist; they weren’t even bad on their own! I was friends with some of them individually, but when they grouped up… Ugh.

Anyway, I’m still a little mentally scarred from the bullying, and it’s probably my only mental ‘flaw’: I lack self-esteem when it comes to girls. I don’t actually believe a girl could be interested in me. It’s OK, while I’m talking, but when it gets right down to it, it becomes that that classic question: ‘How do you get a girl that’s laughing at your jokes into your bed?’ If anyone knows the answer to that, let me know.

With a grown-up view of things, I can see that my self-confidence issues are without merit and totally insane; but hey, who said fear or self-deprecation of any kind was rational?

But back to the happy childhood: you can see from the blurry background of the photo, that I was at Disneyland, at the age of 3 (I was a very large child!) By the age of 3 I’d been to Disneyland and Disneyworld and I’d walked up the steep hills of San Franciso. Back in England I was liberally educated, studying whatever I wanted to study — and excelling. I disliked sports, so I stopped running around and kicking balls. Instead I spent my time dissecting and rebuilding computers, and later programming and playing games on them.

The problem with a happy childhood is that there are no real stand-out moments that I can easily relate to and write about. I remember running around a lot — something I don’t do any more — and being a lot more bouncy than I am now. I remember being given a lot of attention from both my parents, and my inquisitive nature was never quashed. There’s a lot to be said for gentle guidance and the continual feeding of a young, impressionable mind.

I don’t propose to know more about parenting than anyone else — God knows I’ve not done it myself yet — but bringing up a child ‘correctly’ must be an interesting balancing act, if ‘correctly’ can even be defined (something to do with societal norms, I guess). I have friends that were brought up by completely claustrophobia-inducing and burgeoning parents, and I also have friends that might as well not had parents. Obviously I can’t be objective, as I’m the one in the middle, but I definitely think I’m the most ‘balanced’ of any of my friends.

It reminds me of my first week at university — do you know who partied the hardest, drunkenly slept with the most people and got horrendously sick? The kids that came from very strict backgrounds.

Temperance is the way forward!

Oh, just to tie it all up… Despite the hair, I do look a lot cuter in the picture than the modern-day hairy Sebastian, right? You can even see my dimple! Nice comments might encourage me to do a ‘Sebastian as a teenager’ entry (still sporting the Beatles bowl-cut!! Thank you, mother).

I also want to add that I still own the Transformer that you can see at the bottom of the photo… it’s on a shelf behind me, looking very dirty, dusty and worse for wear, but still very much my favourite toy.

Last week, after I uploaded that picture of me sporting a dorky bowl-cut, I also updated my Facebook profile with the picture.

Obviously, I was instantly inundated with ‘Awww, cute!’ from the girls and ‘Hey Seb, you shaved?’ from the boys. My cousin also replied, and he instantly transported me back to a moment in my childhood. I promised I would track down a photo that I have of me and him, riding some kind of truck. Warning, this is incredibly cute:

I haven’t named him, but if he wants to come here and claim his fame, please do! This picture mirrors the paradigm of our relationship — he was always ‘the bottom’. I would do the pushing  around; he would always do my bidding.

This post about my childhood should provide some good background reading for my About page; it will explain my motivations behind what makes me tick today.

The Age of Mobility

Sadly, I’m just kidding. My cousin is 10 months my senior and from what I’m told, I used to follow him around and do whatever he did. That’s why I love that picture so much; it shows that even at a young age, even with kids older and stronger than me, I was developing leadership skills that were to see me to be forever… mounted. I guess, even when I was just a few years old, I had a charisma that could enable me to get away with just about anything.

My childhood is full of stories of me doing crazy things and getting away with it. Until I was 2 or 3, we lived on the premises of a school (my mum was a teacher). When I was 2, I took the keys to a school bus (from the main office), walked outside, climbed into the bus and started it up. I also used to go walking… walking for a long time. Into the woods, around the out buildings. I assume there were people keeping an eye on me, but I really don’t remember!

I’m told I would go and talk to the grounds keepers, or mechanics. I was highly inquisitive as a child, and I’ve certainly kept that trait as I’ve grown up. I like to refer to these first 3 years as ‘the age of mobility‘, as it was the only time in my life where I was so active that it was actually troublesome for my parents to keep up with me. I slowed down a lot once I discovered computers — but computers just gave me access to millions of other people to work into a stupor through sheer charismatic enthrall.

Now have a completely random and adorable black and white picture of me from a photo booth. Aged 1 or 2 I guess — the next frame is of my mother, but I haven’t included it, as I should probably ask her first!

I told you that bowl-cut plagued me…

The Age of Inquisition

I was incredibly inquisitive as a child, often to a fault. That I disassembled over 10 video machines as a child is a fact my mother likes to remind me of on a regular basis. I remember sliding my sandwich into the hole, and then taking the machine apart to find out why the sandwich had stopped it from working. Later, as I became brighter, I would take them apart just try and work out what each bit did. I located and interrogated the capacitors, the integrated circuits, the magnets. While I stopped destroying video machines after a few years, I’m probably still the best person to ask for help if you have a faulty one (but I don’t think anyone has one any more, do they?) Maybe I should ask my mum if I can take apart the DVD player… or three.

When I wasn’t at home taking apart radios, washing machines and video players, I would be asking why? every 30 seconds. In the car, in my pram, walking — Why mummy? Why is it like that?

That trait still plagues me today, although my knowledge of the world is so vast now that asking why? rarely rewards me with an answer. Now I have to find out things for myself; I have to tear down reality and poke around at the mechanics of the world — and people  — to find out the answers I so desperately need.

That’s the main reason I travel: to see new environments and new cultures. I won’t be content until I know what makes everyone tick. It’s that kind of general knowledge that draws people to me for advice, and why I’m often considered wise.

A lot of people today are quite happy just to accept things they see and experience as given. When they ask Why? they are content with an answer of Because. I couldn’t imagine living in a world where everything happens just because. Cars whiz by, planes roar overhead and data is transferred across the span of the world at the speed of light — don’t you want to know how it happens?

I guess the next update on my childhood has to be of my teenage years… Maybe I can just get away with a crappy picture of me as a teenager, and leave it at that. Hmm.

In the past couple of years, it has seemed that everything is about babies. Who is having babies, when they’re having babies, what they’re going to call their babies — and on, and on, and on. Some of the women around here have even been having ’synchronised babies’, so that they can share in the joys, woes and experiences of being a glowing mother-to-be. And of course, once they give birth, the two (possibly unfortunate?) children have the pleasure of being inexorably linked for the first few years of their life.

Let me tell you, those few formative years are important! People (often of the doctor variety) say that we don’t recall much from the first 3 years of our life, and that might be true, certainly. But it’s not all about memories and recall, it’s about something far more basic — and primal; it’s about nurture! It’s in our fledgling years that we begin to learn the difference between right and wrong; what’s safe, and what isn’t. It’s in those early years that we have have experiences that later change our entire outlook on life. Those fleeting months — those months that will go by ever so quickly — will see us discover our dreams, and harbour our first fears and anxieties.

I will write more about childhood in the future, as it’s an important topic for me, but just think about this one: we’re born without fear, and without prejudices. As children, the world is a shiny, untainted place. If only we were born with bigger legs and stronger hearts we’d be off exploring the universe without a second thought.

As you can tell, I think an awful lot rests on the early years of a child. It’s no surprise that I’m anxious about having children: I want to make sure I get it absolutely right! If I can’t get it right, I’d rather not do it at all. I can deal with self-inflicted damage, but damaging a little, baby person? I don’t think I could knowingly do that to a child.

So, because of the local baby boom, this has all been running around in my head. Then today, a family friend left her two babies with us; with my mother and sister. The girl, who is about a year old, was looked after by my sister the whole day. Truth be told, I think she enjoyed it a bit too much, and I think she’ll be wanting one of her own very soon. My mother, despite my aforementioned misgivings, insisted I spend some time with the baby boy.

‘No, no… don’t… I’ll drop him.’

‘Don’t be silly, Seb, he’s tiny, you’ll be fine!’

And so there I was, sitting at this very computer, when my mother unceremoniously plopped the child onto my knee. He grinned at me. I grinned back. A little knee bounce and another big, cheeky grin. I turned him to face my computer screen, and he grinned again, broader this time: this guy and I obviously had some common ground! We poked around my computer for a bit, showing him my blog (and the pretty photos of course), and then we played a game of ‘find his favourite kind of music’, where he proved that yet again has very good taste. Out of a line-up of Glen Campbell, Green Day and Elvis Costello, he chose Withita Lineman — what a baby!

And then, out of no frickin’ no where, just like that, my anxieties were gone. I’m not saying I clung onto the baby for the rest of the day — far from it, I was still petrified of dropping him, or teaching him some awful habit that he’d show his mother later on, like farting or picking his nose — but I did decide, there and then, that I’d probably make a great father. Maybe… just maybe I’d be good enough to nurture a child just right.

It was then, of course, that my mind turned to possible baby names. I already have a girl’s name chosen (if a possible wife happens to be reading this — sorry, you’re too late, and you get no say), but I’m still fairly open on the subject of the ideal name for my first son, and heir to my throne.

If you’ve read my ‘about‘ page, you’ve probably worked out that I aspire to rule the world. I’m well aware that conquering and ruling the world is probably not something I can do in one life time — I could certainly begin the process, but it would have to be a mantle of ownership passed down to my son: the one true heir and emperor; the heir that, unlike the meek, will actually inherit the world.

Now, an emperor of the world needs a good name. He needs a strong name. A name that instills both loyalty and admiration. A name so epic and awe-inspiring that legends and myths will manifest from the path he walks, the deeds he performs and the words he utters.

A name like Romulus, Zeus or Caesar.

Once I have a name, all I need is a wife that will bear the child. A child that will be born with legs strong enough to cross the Earth in just a few strides.

“Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a Czech author of fiction, born in Prague, who was unfortunately only successful posthumously. He wrote in German, so that quote is merely a translation: an incredibly accurate and astutely-observed deduction that he only reached

That quote will be the basis for this article. I will expand it out and try to apply some of my own wisdom. I will try to explain why a world once so beautiful is now drab and dreary. Surely it is painfully obvious that the world we live in is still beautiful: those photos in National Geographic, or those TV shows of weird, otherworldly panoramas — they’re not lying. Those places are real and this world is still beautiful.  Objectively, we must be able to agree that the world is full of beauty. You might gripe and balk, claiming things ‘aren’t what they used to be’. You might claim that the world is a scarier place than when you were younger, fearless, running through a field of tall grass to escape your mother’s clutches.

These are subjective views of the world, a view of the world through your jaded eyes.  A view interpreted by your bitter brain. It’s not rational. The world is not ugly or dysfunctional. The world still is beautiful. We just don’t see it that way any more.

I was so easily pleased as a child. An ice cream or a new rattle would make me grin like a fool. Something as simple as a casette tape that I could grab with my pudgy hands and gnaw with my new teeth could keep me entertained for hours. Everything back then was so new and shiny; you really can’t leave any stone unturned when you’re a kid, the curiousity would eat you alive! What happens when you stick your finger in there? Why does the cat scratch me when I put it under the tap? Who comes running if I scream as loudly as I can?

Where does that wide-eyed look of amazement go? Why don’t adults jump out of bed, look out the window and smile? Perhaps they smile, but only until self-awareness returns and reality snaps back into sight. The mantle of stress settles back down upon your shoulders and the smile disappears.

Why, as adults, are we so damn hard to please? Why can’t we find pleasure in the simple act of surviving, or discovering something new? Why does being an adult like feel like nothing more than 60 years of receiving socks for your birthday?

Go back to when you were younger. Shut your eyes, if that helps, and recall a time when you were a child. A time when you were reckless; stomping around the garden, running away from your parents at an amusement park, stealing candy from the cupboard. You probably can’t remember the exact details, but you can probably recall the emotion you were feeling, or perhaps a strong smell or visual memory. You’re grinning now, right, in recollection?

Our childhood is simply full of those memories — the memories of first-time experiences. Adult life is a little more sparse, but you probably still remember your first kiss, or the first film you saw at the cinema — they are probably even more intense, undulled by the passage of time. You also remember the bad first times: when you fell from your bike and scraped your knee, or when your best friend dumped you for someone else.

These experiences (and thus memories) are so intense and so memorable that they inevitably form the basis of who you will become. This is, in fact, nurture. Nurture isn’t just being slapped for eating candy before dinner, or being told that you’ll get hairy palms if you continue so fervently. Nurture is everything that happens to you, from birth through to death. Nurture governs, through good experiences, what will become the love and passion of your life. Conversely, and this is the important bit, your bad experiences dictate what will become your fears and distrusts.

It is through bad experiences — the presence of pain, both mental and physical — that we learn what to avoid in the future. When we are stung by a bee as a child that nearly always develops into a fear of bees when we’re older. When we’re scolded by our mother for running around the house, we’re unlikely to grow into Olympic athletes.

This isn’t a new thing — it’s incredibly ancient, probably going back millions of years. Even the most basic of animals do the same: they avoid pain at all costs. It’s a survival trait! You do something wrong, it causes pain, you don’t do it again in the future. This is basic, basic stuff to ensure the continued existance of your race.

And that’s what causes us to become dull. Eventually, with enough painful experiences, we become jaded. Our decision making is so clouded by every single one of those pains that it becomes very hard to simply have fun. You can’t go skydiving because you fell and hit your head when you were younger. You can’t stand under a waterfall because you almost drowned when you were a child. It’s a survival instinct, but it’s not necessarily rational.

We’re living in a world with an infinite number of possibilities and an infinite source of beauty. Our ability to see that beauty — and reach Peter Pan’s Never Land, if you believe Kafka — is impeded only by our fears. As children we were endlessly energetic and reckless because we didn’t know of the pains that awaited us. The only difference is that now we approach everything with such boring cautiousness.  We don’t pick it up and shake it around — we’re afraid it’ll blow our hands off!

A world composed of people living in fear, unable to see the innate beauty of our surroundings is a world devoid of creative inspiration. When everyone is afraid of getting their hands dirty, or doing something just to see what happens, that’s a dead world.

Just remember, next time you have a wild idea — something fun, something awesome — don’t let what occurred 20 years ago get in the way. Just do it!

This is a series of posts (Time-Travel Thursday) which so far has looked only at the beginning of my time at university, between 2003 and 2004. After the events of last week’s entry I begun a relationship that would span the remainder of my time at university; it wasn’t an uneventful time, but it was particularly peaceful. I’ll write about sometime, just not today. I want to talk about the past, so you can understand a bit more about me today.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ve probably noticed a recurring theme: I’ve been hilariously unfortunate when it comes to girls. I’ve been fortunate too — heck, I still consider myself lucky to have been with all my girlfriends — but, inevitably, bad relationships end. I remember the good times fondly, of course, but it’s the bad times that really stick with you. The pain and emotional distress from a bad relationship and the ensuing break-up really bogs us down! Some people are still plagued by uncertainty, unknowingness and doubt from relationships that ended a decade ago. Bad relationships haunt us.

The relationship I’m going to tell you about still lingers hauntingly, affecting my decisions when it comes to other girls — potential girlfriends.

If you’ve ever experimented with blindfolds in the bedroom with a loved one you’ll know that the experience is intense. With our visual sense deprived, other senses kick into overdrive, competing and clamouring to be heard by the brain. Before you know it, you’re flinching and squirming and whimpering, unable to predict what will happen next. Your partner has you in the palm of their hand.

Ultimate gratification is a boon that only your partner can provide in such a situation. Or, alternatively, your partner could walk out of the room and leave you there on the bed, blindfolded, prone, alone, unable to act and defenceless.

A relationship itself is like being emotionally blindfolded. In a relationship, our remaining senses are heightened, our emotional empathy increases.  In exchange, our foresight disappears. Love is blind(ness)! Objectivity flies out of the window. The world you so gracefully inhabited beforehand slides into a blurred, grey background — out of sight, out of mind. It’s just you and your lover, spotlit, center stage. In my case, it was me and The American. She had me blindfolded, but it wasn’t so dark that I couldn’t make our her brilliantly bright form, picked out by the focused spot light of my love.

(Ironic, now that I think about it, that I put it into photographic terms. I’ve known her for 8 years, and I possess just 2 photos of her. And about a million mental images of her.)

In a relationship, our happiness is completely at the whim of our lover — the lover that has us chained down in a bed, emotionally blindfolded. You can’t force her to bestow upon you the heavenly, nirvana-like pleasures of love, intimacy and sex. It’s up to her. Where there isn’t an equality of control, where one person controls the entire flow of the relationship, where one partner holds the keys and forces you to jump through hoops to attain love, and thus happiness and satisfaction — these relationships are destined to fail.

If only I’d known that when I was 16.

If only I’d known, as I sat there on the bench, watching a beautiful blonde girl slowly wend her way through a throng of school friends towards me, that 8 years down the line, I’d still be nursing a fragmented heart.

She was short. Really short, perky and cute. It was a strong start, certainly. She’d finished traversing the crowd of kids and stood before me.

‘Hi!’ A ready smile, too. Good teeth. A grin that lit up her little face.

Unfortunately, she had an American accent.

‘Ah… you were doing so well, until you opened your mouth!’

The opening words of a relationship that, one form or another, would span almost a decade. Middle school, highschool and college.

I’ve told you before that I’m really mean to girls that I like, right? It’s probably a self-defence thing; a self-esteem thing. Pushing a girl away before she gets close enough to tease my heart-strings, and then inevitably dump me for a stronger, hairier and manlier man than I. Well, try as I might, this one wouldn’t be pushed. She sat down next to me and just continued to smile. I perservered. Continuing with low blows, sarcasm and a neverending, incessant pick-pick-picking of her American accent and mannerisms, I just couldn’t shake her off.

She loved it. She’d never experienced it before, being America — the dry, English wit; irony — or perhaps she just fancied the socks off me. I like to think it’s because she wanted my babies. Perhaps I was so funny that she wanted my babies?

She only stayed for the summer that time but she promised she’d be back. If she hadn’t come back, I would’ve gone to her anyway; 5000 miles was nothing for a couple of smitten, lovesick teenagers that craved each other’s company.

A year later and I’m in the process of finding a buyer for one of my kidneys when I receive an email from her: ‘I’m flying over in August. We need to talk.’

She refused to tell me about it over email.

In fact, she must’ve realised sometime between writing the email and the amazing 3 months we spent together that summer that her mother could talk to me instead.

And so it was that, one day, sitting outside eating lunch, her mother sat down beside me.

‘We need to talk, Sebastian.’

‘About what?’ I’d completely forgotten about the aforementioned ‘talk’ and I had a big grin on my face: I didn’t like her mother particularly, but it made sense to smile at your future mother-in-law, right?

‘This relationship of yours, between you and my daughter. It can’t continue.’

My heart skipped a beat. ‘Why…?’

‘She has a fiancé in America. Her childhood sweetheart. She’s marrying him this winter.’

To be continued…

If you haven’t read the first half of the story you really, really should. In fact, this entry won’t make much sense, nor will it have anywhere near the same emotional impact if you don’t start from the beginning — so go and read the first half!

It’s the last night of school, the summer ball. A coming of age for many, but I still haven’t had my first kiss. We walk away together, muted, numb, hand in hand. I turn to face her when we reach the car park and I’m reminded of just how much taller than her I am. She’s at least a foot shorter than me and still as beautiful as the day we first met, 2 years ago.

We continue to wait in silence, not really sure of what can be said; what should be said.

‘Would a kiss be out of the question?’ I’m the one breaking the silence. It would be quite a different story if she’d been the one asking.

‘You know I can’t… we can’t…’ She sounds so incredibly disappointed, held back by a promise made to someone I’d never met, her childhood sweetheart. Her fiancé. Her thief, unwittingly and unfairly stealing away the love of my life.

My dad arrives and we hop tentatively into the back of his car. I cry quietly. At least she can’t see my face or eyes. She too begins to cry. We head back to her place, both in some kind of dark void — limbo — unaware of anything beyond our immediate surroundings, intent on keeping one last crystal-clear shared memory, sharp and  deeply etched. Maybe wind rushed in through an open window, or music tumbled lazily out of the radio, I don’t know. We’re both lost in the moment, crying.  The car stops and for a moment silence rules. The memory of her opening the door and slowly stepping out into the dark night is quickly and vividly seared into the memories of my adolescence.

I open my door and follow her to the doorstep.

I smile in the darkness, my lips twisted into some kind of disgusting rictus; irony and self-pity rolled into one. She’d played me all along. A game that, while beautiful, had had its outcome set in stone since the day we’d first met. I’d fallen for her and she’d fallen for me, but try as we might, this parting moment had been inescapable. Preordained is the word I think they use, and I wouldn’t have minded if someone Up There had taken her from me. But it wasn’t God, nor some angelic, oiled-torsoed Adonis: it was some pesky, backward farmer boy with a predilection for big, shiny tractors.

‘Bye, Sebby.’ I nodded with finality and turned to leave. I stopped for a moment, looking over my shoulder.

‘You owe me a kiss.’ That was me talking again. I meant it.

Five years went by. Five. A lot happened in those five years. I aged from 17 to 22. In truth, I’d almost forgotten about her. She was always there, in the back of my mind, one of a few ‘what ifs’. I’m not one to linger and dwell though; my thoughts of her were of platonic curiousity rather than visceral yearning — I wondered how she’d been, if marriage had been worth it. If she regretted not kissing me that night on her doorstep. Most of what you’ve read on this blog happened after she vanished.

I know it sounds like some kind of awful Hollywood, silver-screen cliche, but I knew she’d come back. There was too much unfinished business to simply… up and leave. That’s not to say I wrote sappy love letters, or abstained from sex and relationships, hoping that one day the phone would ring — no, university came and went without contact. I begun my travels around the world — there were even trips to America and Los Angeles, close to where I thought she might be. But of course, I had no address — her mother forbade any contact. I briefly thought about quizzing people on the streets if they’d ’seen this girl’, but the only photo I had of her was 5 years old and probably no use. Plus, people don’t really do that in real life… do they?

It was now January 2007. 20:00 January 17th, 2007 — midday, Pacific Standard Time, her time. I have new email, and it’s from her. I can’t really describe how I felt at that instant, but I should at least try: light-headed euphoria. Righteous vindication. I’m so rarely wrong — I so rarely make a bad call — but I was seriously starting to doubt if I’d got this one wrong. 5 years is a long time to leave a guy hanging for a kiss; I’m patient, but there are limits! When that email finally arrived, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Returning… — January 17th 2007

Hi Sebby.

I’m considering returning back to the UK very shortly to live there for a bit.

Saw your photos. Very nice! Quite the world traveller these days, aren’t you?

I’m sure I’ll hear from you soon.

Love,

Understated, as always. A fluttering, torrential storm of mail followed as we quickly caught up, though a lot remained unsaid until we finally met again in person, a month later.

To this day, I still can’t believe she was reading my journal and looking at my photos — keeping tabs, like a voyeur. She could’ve said Hi, just once, but no, she made me wait. I guess that should’ve been the first sign that the ball was still very much on her side of the court. My heart thumped a rhythm dictated by her carefully-orchestrated maneuvers. 7 years had passed since we met, but nothing had changed.

If only I’d known that in March, when we first kissed, that this wasn’t going to be the happily-ever-after that I — we? — had so hoped for. Nothing had changed for the better — or for worse — we were still very much in love, but it wasn’t going to be an easy ride.

A year later, after some of the most blissfully memorable moments of my life, she left me again. A year of apocryphal magic — times of love, of her tiny body wrapped in my arms, her soft skin teasing my fingertips — tainted by lows that still haunt me today: would things have turned out differently if I’d whispered different sweet nothings into her ear?

Seven years of strife for a single year of part-time love.

I haven’t seen or heard from her since. I don’t think she’s coming back this time, either.

I had planned a fantastic post today about immortality (as one does…) but as I sat down to type it out, my mother called up the stairs:

‘Don’t forget, it’s your birthday tomorrow!’

Thanks for reminding me, mum.

‘25! That’s a quarter of a century! A third of your life, GONE!’

You can shut up now, mum.

‘By the time I was your age, I was married and had you!’

I shut my door, sat down and… pouted. How am I meant to think philosophically about immortality — the soul, your mind, infinity — when my mother’s busy reminding me of my own, pesky mortality?

‘I expect grandchildren sooner rather than later, Sebby.’ Somehow, her nagging had penetrated my door. Remind me to buy some high-density foam with my birthday money. To soundproof my room. Though, I could probably smother her with it, too; and no, not in ’smothered in cream’ sense — I’m not Oedipus.

And so it is with anger in my fingers that I bash out this blog entry. I’m not old damnit. I have plenty of time to get things done, to find the next love of my life and to spawn a son suitable for inheriting my universal empire. Oodles of hours and a slew of centuries — however you measure it, it’s still time, a slave destined to bend to the wishes of its master: us. Mark my words, friends: we will live forever.

Laying aside that particular topic, I have a bunch of fun photos to share with you, to celebrate the first 25 years of my life. But first, as with all living things, there was a birth. I was born after 48 hours of labour, by Caesarean section (fitting, considering my aspirations), to a rather tired mother. I was almost called Dominic (of all names, why Dominic?) but thankfully my mother’s crush for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited prevailed. I can’t imagine being called Dominic now; it’s hardly the name of an intergalactic imperator.

That’s me, a month or two old — it’s hard to tell, because I was a huge baby, 10lbs or more (remember, ladies, 48 hours. 2 days of labour). The Brits will recognise the gesture I’m making; the rest of you will just have to believe me when I say it’s a fitting flick of the fingers. Looking through our Hall of Fame (we have a corridor dedicated to our old photos), I hardly recognise myself until I’m about 2 or 3. New-born, I look like my mother — a year or two later, I start to look like my father. By the age of 4, I’m a bit of both but a new ingredient has been thrown into the mix: cuteness.

It’s kind of sad to realise, looking through the hall of fame, that I’ll never be as cute as that again. I peaked at the age of four. Perhaps my mother is right — perhaps I do need to find a wife as soon as possible. Perhaps, as each day ticks by and another year is sliced from my mortality, I’m getting uglier. Ugh. Oh well. I’ll just tell every girl that I meet that I actually look just like the photo above, if I shave it all off. That’ll work.

Things got a little wonky after that, and I shan’t be posting pictures from my teenage years again. If you really want to see what I look like, go and read my childhood entries. Warning: I look a bit like a girl.

Moving swiftly on, from the androgynous Beatles-lookalike stage of my life, I bring you kicking-and-screaming to my 21st birthday!

I’m having more fun than it looks, I promise. I’m just making it quite clear that the bits of foil stuck on my face were not my own doing, and they kept falling off into my food. Japanese food deserves better than that, damnit! Fun side-story: the phone being looked at in the background has naked photos of my ex-girlfriends on, and they’re just about to find them. And one of them was my girlfriend at the time (hah, that’ll teach them to pry!) It’s also the phone I eventually lost on a bus, making some guy (or girl) very lucky indeed… sorry, girlfriends. I’m sure they can’t identify you from that angle, anyway.

I’ll finish with a photo from my last summer ball — the final event in the university’s social calendar — with what seems to be a very happy girl in my arms:

It’s shocking how much I look like my cousin, but that’s another story for another day! By the time you read this, I’m probably in bed, trying to catch a few fleeting hours of sleep before my mother bounds into my bedroom to celebrate the passing of yet another significant milestone in my life. Twenty-one, check. Quarter-century, check. The next must surely be ‘get married’… Or will thirty come and go…?

It’s not too late to send me a birthday present! I accept almost any form of gift/keepsake including, but not limited to: book token, personalised poem, (un)used underwear, cash or banker’s draft.

Life is the game of infinite choices. A field that you can wend your way through a billion times and still stumble across patches you’ve not seen before.

Every quick-running or slow-walking step alters your route through the field, through life. When you stop to smell the blooms of beauty, pause a while beneath the boughs of a tree or simply lift your head and eyes to the skies and smile, these experiences change who you are. They don’t change you but they affect your senses: you are born looking through eyes of pure clarity but with age comes fettered, foggy vision.

It’s not that the field is different. It just looks and feels different. The field itself changes very little, in ways that are predictable. The framework of existence brings periods of pestilence and death when the lush emerald greens of life all but vanish, but it also  brings new births, explosions of new energy. There are always seasons of bountiful growth when the booming burst of life seems to oust even the most die-hard spectres of dark pasts.

In the space between there is balance. It is among and between the spurts of life and rubble of death that we walk. It is right here and now, where we breathe and live and smile and survive that we make decisions about how we live our life; how best to cross that field, one step at a time.

What path should I choose? Will I let divine covenant or the winds of fortune guide me, knowing that every step I make will alter my ultimate destination?

If it helps, there are no wrong moves and only one rule, one obligation: I must make it to the end. I must survive the infinite game of life. How well I survive is only limited by my zeal and imagination.

Live life. Enjoy, relish and savour its tumultuous twists and turns: it’s meant to be fun!

This won’t be a complete backstory, but it will fill in a few big gaps. It includes and expands upon bits from my childhood entries and the ‘about‘ page. This should illuminate my scattered, eclectic writings on this blog. This should spread light on themes that you may’ve noticed and upon which I will now elucidate. This post is actually celebrating a ‘blog milestone’, though in true, chronically-understated British fashion, I shan’t say what that milestone is. Enjoy this revealing expose of inner Sebbiness; I’ll be hiding in the corner over there.

* * *

As I forced the last piece of LEGO into position with a snap I decided then that I would be an engineer; I was only five at the time and didn’t know what the word meant, nor what they did. The only thing I knew was that making things — crafting intricate constructions from simple, constituent parts — was fun. Really damn fun. You start off with a box of bits and amorphous blobs leftover from previous creations, and you can make anything! Well, almost anything, as defined by the rules and mechanics of LEGO blocks.

It was those rules, those axioms, that interested me the most. My parents will tell you that I was never a huge fan of using my hands — I was never the kind of kid to make rickety tree houses or bird tables — they were just a means to an end: to discover rules! Hands were great at pulling apart and unscrewing video machines, toasters and televisions. I had no idea how things actually worked, but God-damn it was fun trying to work it out! I would look at the parts, at the wreckage of my latest interest, and try to somehow divine the magical rules that made them go.

As I grew up my LEGO bricks turned into Technic cogs and Meccano struts, and thus my education continued: I learnt about physics and the inescapable force of gravity; torque and various structural designs to nullify its effects; the fun that could be had with elastic energy! Most importantly, I learnt about the two forces that dominate our current understanding of the world: chemical and electrical energy. Heating mixtures of chemicals and watching in (pained) awe as they exploded into my face taught me the wonders of cause and effect; reactions. Adding electrical motors to my constructions added life. And that was the key: I’d finally found out how to make things happen.

Enter my first computer at the geriatric age of eight (I was spoilt, some might say). This is probably where the tale should take a dark and oppressive turn for the worse but fortunately… it does not! Unless you consider the abject horror and avoidance of all physical exercise, caused by continued computer use, a bad thing. Actually, that’s a lie: I enjoyed tennis and badminton, but only because my arms were so long that I could reach almost everywhere without moving. I won’t bore you with any more from my teenage years, but you can read my childhood entries if you’re really interested.

In short, my teenage years were… OK. Not great, and often introverted. I was bullied for being fat and far too intelligent. Fortunately the bullying didn’t impact my thirst for knowledge, but it did culture my antisocial tendencies. I don’t mean I went around throwing bricks through windows (I did this just once, when I fell in with some bad boys), I mean that I’ve been a hermit ever since. My teenage life wasn’t completely devoid of social interaction. I did have friends. But for example, the only parties I would attend would be those I couldn’t skip, lest I become a social outcast. Being social, for the teenage Seb, was an obligation.

Looking back, it was a sad, lonely way of living. I don’t know if it was caused by the bullying, or just my continued interest in learning. Y’see, I would be great company until I realised that I’d actually rather be somewhere else, learning how to make explosives or program a new computer language. The only friends I did keep were ones that had identical interests to mine, or were intelligent enough that they remained interesting to me. A bit of a pragmatic — some would say selfish — view of friendships. Again, I don’t know what caused it, but my thirst for knowledge compelled me to flit about from person to person and from book to book, devouring anything and everything that I stumbled across in my search for more data.

When you’re a teenager, mixing your friends up a little is a common occurrence — so what if one day you’re best friends with John, and Steve the next? Looking back, I guess that’s why no one noticed what I was up to. And I’m still the same today, though my years at university tempered my hermit-like tendencies and almost turned me into a social butterfly! Still, when it comes to friends — relationships that I nuture and tend to regularly — I still only have two close ones. The first, I talk to once a week if I’m lucky, the second I might see once a year, or less (does that make me a bad friend?) It’s not so easy to ‘bounce between friends’ when you’re an adult; when you’re a grown-up you can’t just chew, digest and unceremoniously dump your friends.

That’s why I travel and I guess… why I don’t have friends.

It feels lame to cite Fight Club of all things, but its popularity will help make my point: I like single servings. The people I meet on trains and planes are tasty enough to tantalise my taste buds without the risk of becoming dull or flavourless. I might only spend six hours with a friend made while climbing over ancient ruins in Turkey, but when you’re thrown into a similar situation together and share the same experiences, you learn a lot about each other, and you learn it quickly. Single, intense servings of personality; more than just a passing acquaintance, but less than a friendship. At the end we can both go our own ways; a single serving with no strings attached.

Finally, we’ve arrived at the contemporary Seb, where I understand enough about myself that I can attempt to define my personal philosophy. ‘Attempt’, because it’s hard to name and qualify thoughts that, without scope or definition, have run around my head for 25 years. So bear with me as I try to put it into some clumsy words: I demand rationality, but not in the conventional sense. As humans, we are exceptionally good at being rational, but only within the confines of a working, true set of data. You can only be as rational as your education allows — if you have been told that the world is flat, it’s rational to assume it is indeed flat. But that’s not rationality; at least not for me. Most ’stupidity’, as viewed from an objective point of view, is (unsurprisingly) caused by a lack of education. The stupid person probably doesn’t know he’s being stupid though — in his head he’s just doing as he’s been taught!

Rationality, for me, is an absolute: not simply a given, limited set of truths taught through nurture, dogma or education.

Rationality, for me, is the neverending search for a body of knowledge so vast, so all-encompassing that, one day, will hopefully allow me to understand the workings of the universe, and those that populate it.

There we have it: one of my most secret and character-definining traits laid bare for all to see. I hope it goes some way to explaining how I look at the world, and ultimately what I write on this blog. I am, in essence, trying to get my head around everything; I’m pulling the world apart, screw by screw, hoping to find the answers. As and when I find them, I’ll be sure to share.

* * *

There are some fun photos to follow tomorrow. They were meant to accompany this entry, but now it seems inappropriate. If you want funny pictures, go and look at the ones of me as a kid…

This is a continuation from a series of entries I wrote chronicling my childhood and teenage years. For some reason I got sidetracked — I wrote about ‘that tale from my teenage years‘, and before I knew it I was writing about my crazy relationships and sexual encounters.

And then I got talking about The American. I often write as if I’m not affected by what unfolds — chilled, objective — but the truth is… I am. I am effected. I’m not soulless. I’m not frigid or cold. I just don’t often let my feelings bubble to the surface. I don’t linger or fester. But yes, you might look at these broken relationships of mine, these squandered chances, and wonder: ‘How come he sounds so remote, so unbothered?’ – well, the real truth is: I am bothered. I am right there, reliving the memory as it flows through my synapses to my fingertips. Unfortunately — or fortunately — I have an incredibly vivid imagination. I can recall almost any instance in time and be there – and when I write, I’m tapping into those memories. I frown and smile and sigh and cry as I write. You just don’t get to see it… (Should I apologise here? Maybe?)

As to why it all comes out ‘a little distant and removed’, I have no idea. It seems I’m objective and sensible to a fault. Perhaps I’m just too damn rational, if that’s possible.

Anyway, when I was younger, from 10 through 17, I was a lot less rational. I was shy, reticent. I could be made jealous very easily. I had little to no self-confidence. All I really had were my dreams. And computers.

I know it sounds dramatic, but it’s true. I had two immutable things that no one could take away from me: dreams and computers.

I think you probably already know quite a lot about my love affair for computers… so dreams are what this entry’s about.

These are the roles I dreamed and the fantasy lands I drifted to when I was being teased, pushed around, bullied.

Things I’ve Wanted To Be, Since The Age of Three

What do you want to be when you grow up, Seb?

I’ve never wanted to be an astronaut, believe it or not. In fact, my mother and I can only recall three things that I’ve ever wanted to be:

• A driver. I’ve always loved cars, vehicles, speed, acceleration. I don’t know if this comes from some innate love of engineering, maybe. At the age of 24 months I famously located the keys to my school’s bus, got into the bus, and started the engine. For a long time I wanted to be a Quad bike driver, off-road style. Later, after I was allowed behind the wheel of my dad’s Porsche, I wanted to be a racing or rally driver. I have some fun stories to tell about me and cars; I’ll try to tell them soon. I’d still like to be a rally driver.
• A lawyer. I’m pretty sure my mother came up with this one, rather than me showing an actual interest in litigation. ‘You’re great at arguing’ she would say. ‘You enjoy arguing a lot, don’t you dear?’ — and she wasn’t wrong. I love arguing. I love proving a point. I banter for the sake of bantering — though that’s not something you are likely to see unless you are a very close friend, or family member. I can be very intense when arguing something. But I don’t think I ever really wanted to be a layer. I’d probably be a very good one, but there’s no… urge there, for whatever reason.
• A military engineer and/or spy. Structural engineer that is. I’m not sure where this one came from, but from about the age of 16 through 20 I wanted to work for ‘king and country’ (or queen, as the case may be.) I wanted to build bridges over rivers in war zones. I wanted to be a ‘sapper‘. I think my dad’s dad was a sapper, but I never knew him, he died when my dad was young, before I was born. Later, when my attention turned more towards technology, I wanted to be a spy. Not quite like James Bond, but perhaps some social engineering involved… and a few hot Russian girls. Counter-intelligence, hacking, propaganda — behind-the-scenes stuff! I’d still like to be a spy. But not as much as I’d like to design video games…

Which brings me up to almost-present time! After school I went to college and studied photography, purely as an artistic outlet. At university I studied Computer Games (and computer networks — and if you’ve read my ‘About’ page, you’ll know that I now want to make video games).

After I graduated university I knew only two things: 1) I didn’t want to work in an office from 9 to 5 — and 2) I want to travel the world and see what the rest of Earth (and the universe?) has to teach me. I learnt more about life in four years at college and university than in the 16 years beforehand. In the last few years, as I’ve travelled from continent to continent, country to country, city to city — and across the Rubicon! — I’ve learnt a lot more than university could ever hope to teach me.

I’ve discovered that it’s very hard to have a purpose when you’re always discovering new things that you can be. How can I stop and design video games when there might be something even cooler just waiting to be discovered? (This bit ties into my ‘What makes me tick?‘ entry.)

I honestly can’t fathom why anyone would cease moving, set up shop and extend their tendril roots. Why work in an office from nine through five for 45 years. Why.

What do you want to be when you grow up, Seb?

I don’t know, mum. I might never find out. But the journey is the best bit, right?