I'd sent off for a new passport at the start of the year and it was delivered earlier this week. I had been slightly saddened to notice that they hadn't at the same time returned my old passport. That made me a little sad as all the stamps in there hold sweet and sad memories of adventures past. From my trip to Barbados with Catherine, my lovely girlfriend of ten years ago, through my various flights to Australia for festivals and the excursion to Fiji to write my play
It's Not The End Of Yhe World,
right up to my ill-advised journey to Croatia. Of course I still had my memories, but what were they without a stamp in my passport (though most places I've been to recently don't bother stamping which seems a shame. Despite a busy decade of travelling there had been room left for more inky mementos.
But today in the post my old passport was delivered (the new one had come by courier, but obviously the old ones aren't so important or susceptible to theft). So now I know I entered Barbados on the 30th March 1996 (then again with a less lovely girlfriend on 2nd March 2002) and that I left Thailand on 2nd February 2001, some 16 days over the length of my visa meaning I accrued a fine of 2,200 bahts. I am glad to have the document to remind me and maybe one day my grandchildren will find it in a drawer somewhere and try to imagine who their long dead grandfather was and what he did in these places and how he managed to have grandchildren when he never had any kids.
It made me dig out my previous passport to see where I had been between the ages of 18 and 28, but I should have remembered that due to poverty (of money and imagination) I had had very few holidays in this period. I'd been to America to do Camp America (looks like I entered the country on June 8th 1986) and to the Czech Republic on what might have been the 9th September 1993 (though it doesn't say the year so the 07 09 might mean something else). My old passport has been kept in a tin with other documents for a while and it smells like the drawer at my grandfather's house where he kept all his old photos and birth certificates and stuff. How strange. I might cry like some kind of Jeremy Paxman figure at this jolt back to two pasts.
Of course as well as getting nostalgic I also had a chance to see how my stupid face has changed over the last twenty years. Oh God I have aged (as you might expect) though I have not been helped by the rather harsh light in the most recent photo. But I don't think anyone would have any trouble placing them in chronological order. I think I may have commented on the picture of the 18 year old me before, but look how healthy and slim and good looking I am. My hair so brown, my lips so full, my skin so soft and kissable (you know that's what you're thinking - there's nothing weird about me making such comments about myself). But most of all I have to ask myself, "What the fuck happened to my eyebrows? Where did they go?" So thick and lustrous in 1986, but now mere shadows of their former glory. It looks like I now pluck them, but I promise you I don't.
How I envy the young me and yet despise him for his lack of self-awareness and basic wasting of what few physical attributes the good Lord gave him. How I wish I could go back and tell him where he was going wrong. And then fuck him. There's nothing strange about these retro-narcissistic desires.
The worst thing about all this is that in twenty years time (if I am still here) I will look back at the 2006 photo and wish that I still looked like that and want to fuck myself again. But I don't want to fuck myself now when I look in the mirror. Because time must be added to the occasion and thus I never get beyond third base with myself. Such is the human condition.
Having said that the 1996 photo is pretty rank and I think I might be looking better than that now. Though admittedly not in the 2006 photo. But in reality I look better than that. At least in the reality of how I imagine that I look.
I only need to get a few more decades down the line to create a pretty scary flick book of my life. Watch the pretty young boy become a hideous old man. It would have been more effective if I'd had a photo taken every year, but still the stark leaps of the decade by decade flick book will be more unsettling.
So my passports have made me confront my own mortality and unearthed some strange sexual desires which probably makes it fortunate for me that I haven't invented a time machine (fortunate for the 18 year old me at least, not so sure about the 38 year old me).
I hope you enjoy looking at the photos of my degeneration and if you are young would remind you to make the most of your lives because it all passes by with indecent haste.
The other thing I notice about myself is that in the last 20 years I have got closer.
Today I became 38 and a half.
