1996

I can’t come to terms with the fact it’s 27 years ago.

It’s my fault, I guess, for getting stuck in this amber. Although I cannot be held responsible for the formation of the amber itself, I need to accept some responsibility for getting so stuck, and in turn unstuck from the world as it continued to turn.

It’s just that I woke up with 1996 in my head this morning, with memories that I haven’t been acquainted with for some time because I the cringe of them made me repress them.

“Can you remember when Ledge went dead broad Yorkshire?” my friends would say to me in the following years at high school, kind of intended to cause me embarrassment, as it did so.

It’s true, much to the criticism of my mother, who expressed a now partly-gone way of marking differentiation within the working class, between those who were respectable (who she identified her family with) and those who were ‘common as muck’, who I was apparently talking like. She also wanted to get as far away from the poverty of post-war Britain and then life under Thatcherism, that she was slowly changing the way she spoke, which in turn made me feel ever more embarrassed.

In hindsight I was beginning to feel cut loose from any order of things, and any senses of belonging or authenticity. Coming from a working class family on a small cul-de-sac of private houses, within a larger council estate, I felt like an impostor. I was too soft, had no hard edge, which seemed like a mandatory tool in the survival tool box, and I embarrassingly went on walks on a Sunday rather than hanging around outside the shops, and watched David Attenborough on a Saturday instead of Gladiators and Blind Date.

Yet, I wasn’t a middle class kid. There was a road that split my village between the council estates and the proto-Barrett estate style estate (with even more pretensions pertaining to affluence). These were built roughly at the time that the M1 motorway brought commuter life to the community, and I certainly wasn’t one of them.

My search for authenticity resulted in a hyper-Yorkshire accent, and an obsession with my family tree. This need for belonging developed to a need to fit in at school, which saw me trade in my interests in palaeontology and trees for football and Adidas clothing.

In hindsight, I was a sensitive child who had been pricked by something in the cultural atmosphere, something that would afflict seemingly everybody 20 years later, as we all clamber for an authentic selfhood in a neoliberal climate where all signs pointing to salvation increasingly tell us that we need to find our true self.

That we are so lost in the first place is indeed due to the trauma of the individual competitiveness of neoliberal culture just proves we are all still in the same picture, still being gaslit, but it’s just the colours and tones have faded from the golden hues of the 80s and 90s.

But am I projecting? Surely all expression is produced at the intersection of the interior and exterior. Which means it’s always hard to see where one ends and the other begins.

1996 seemed like a safe plateau after 20th century history had done its deeds. None of us could have known what was coming, regardless of how you interpret the following decades.

I felt lost, but I had a plan to fit in, and the future seemed to be welcoming me. What I now realise is that this sense of being of no place would evolved, and the horizon got closer, into the 3 A’s of anorexia, art and alcohol.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”.

I had no idea of how to go forth into this future, and who really did? I remember the GCSE years of 98-2000, with the laughable job search programs on the old IT class computers, which had such limited scope that nearly all the lads in the class got the job opportunity ‘dog groomer’ as an option.

Most of these ‘lads’ have gone on to have children, and have parted into lives roughly defined by whether they moved away into university culture or stayed in more manual vocations within the area.

And in truth I was part of a subsection of a larger group of mates in my year who would have probably been diagnosed with ADHD if we were at school in 2023, who probably still exist on a contemporary minimum wage. We just weren’t aware soon enough that we were ill-fitting pieces for the reality constitution in front of us.

Anyway, 1996 is a colourful year in my mind. Perhaps one of the most colourful.

Admittedly depression, both in its dormant and active character, has dulled the colour of life in the years that have followed. But 1996 is still luminous, in the greens, golden yellows and oranges, and pinks. It seems to emanate out of the pop music, the clothing, the TV ads and even the ten pence chewy bars from the nearby Costcutter.

Our current retro addiction, our drowning in the nostalgia of past futures that we feel we’ve lost, has created a culture-wide habit of fetishising the 80s, 90s and even 00s to the point where it’s very likely that my memories have been photo-shopped, so to speak, ever since.

However, the colour-drainage that has followed suggests more of the aforementioned intersection of my own experiences and the evolving larger cultural mood.

There is part of me, and important part, that is still admittedly stuck in the golden amber of the 1990s. I know what it is, I know it’s part depression that has forged an illusion. But as things stand, embarrassed as I am to be returning to these subjects year after year, I don’t know the way of bringing closure. But perhaps it’s precisley because I’m not the only one?