THE VANISHED

Isn’t if funny how people you once knew quite well can eventually drop so completely off your personal radar that you can barely remember them at all?

Or is that really just me…?

I’m fully aware that I have a track record of failing utterly to keep in touch with anybody very much over the years and I’m beginning to notice, in this brave new “acquaintance heavy” world that it has grown into, that this may not have been the wisest of paths to choose, even though, on that allegedly “two-way” street through life, I can’t be the only one at fault here.  After all, whilst I do admit that I’ve always been utterly hopeless with names, I did used to be reasonably okay with remembering faces (I am – or I was - after all a “visual” kind of person), even if I wasn’t too sure quite where I recognised them from.

Pauses to remember the quite scary (for her, I imagine – she was, after all, just standing at the side of the road waiting for a taxi) “Gina McKee” moment where I was utterly convinced that she was someone I knew and recognised from a party held during the times when I lived in Levenshulme…

Thankfully I was persuaded otherwise and so my plan to go over and say “hello” that evening was quickly and very firmly nipped in the bud.

Sorry, Gina…

Anyway, enough of that nonsense. What were we talking about again…?

Oh yes, those people you once knew who you now barely remember…

I was forgetting where I was for a moment there.

I was actually thinking about this the other day when I had a small “flashback” of sorts to my student days.

A crowd of us used to drink together quite regularly and there was this girl who I used to talk to who was an occasional member of our extended social circle and, rather bizarrely as it might seem to the wider world at large, we seemed to get on rather well. I don’t mean in a “getting on very well”, “confessions of a youthful dalliance” kind of a way. This was, after all, the younger me we are talking about here, and I wouldn’t have noticed if somebody found me “interesting” or (God help them) “attractive” if they’d come into the bar wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with my picture and holding up a banner saying “We heart U, Martin!!! XXX” back in those days.

I probably still wouldn’t, if truth be told…

But, nevertheless we seemed to enjoy each other’s company and yet, for the life of me, I haven’t got the foggiest what she was called and, because I don’t have any pictures of her either, I wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a line-up if asked.

I’ll grant you that many of our conversations were probably slightly lubricated by a pint or five of Dry Blackthorn, which might go a long way towards explaining why I, at least, thought we got on so well, and that might also explain those missing memory cells when it comes to an actual name, but somehow she’s just slipped from my mind as the years have rolled inexorably onwards, and I can now only remember the barest trickle of information about her at all.

I can, for example remember that she was in the year above us and was studying “fashion design”. This I can recall because of one of the more memorable things another of my friends once said about her, that she was “The most unfashionable fashion student in the world” which probably also explains a lot, now that I come to think about it.

A random selection of people wearing
what was "acceptable in the 1980s..."
I don't know what became of any of them.

I vaguely recall that I thought that she looked a bit like a slightly lower budget or scruffier (in that studenty way we had in back then) version of Princess Di during her “engagement” phase, but then, that was hardly unusual in those days, because a huge proportion of the young women who I saw in those days seemed to be imitating that particular “look”, however subconsciously.

I can clearly remember the one memorable thing that she once told me, probably during a “1970s Party” in the days when I was actually “fun” enough to make at least a token gesture at “dressing up” – although, with the contents of my wardrobe in those days I probably wouldn’t have had to try too hard.

I was, am and probably always will be, somewhat “behind the times”…

Anyway, this is what she told me. She really believed that “1970s fashion will never come back it uses far too much material...” which I thought was quite astute at the time, but she was obviously quite wrong about that, as it did briefly (and scarily) come back “with a vengeance” about a decade ago.

Mind you, there was an awful lot wrong with what we were all wearing during the 1980s, too, although we were unaware of it at the time… Perhaps anyone studying “fashion design” who seemed “unfashionable” might have been on to something…? Still, it does strike me a both funny and a little bit sad how people really can just “vanish” from your life like that and leave virtually no trace of themselves behind.

As I approach my own half century, I do find that more-and-more I am beginning to wonder about the people I once crossed paths with, however obliquely, and whatever became of them. For example, one person I remember absolutely nothing about except for her pair of intensely mesmerising green eyes which didn’t seem at all drawn in my direction for much of an evening spent in a restaurant celebrating some birthday or other. Right now I can picture those eyes still, but nothing else about her springs to my mind at all.

I wonder what became of her…?

I’m sure that I’ll never know. This, I suppose, explains why the grey/silver shift in the strange and mysterious world of “networking” has started to manifest itself although I notice a distinct lack of any crowds desperate to re-acquint themselves with this battered old carcass.

And who can blame them…? To be honest I don’t think I was ever that memorable, and I’ve probably vanished from a lot of memories myself, but you’ve probably forgotten that already…