When Time is Stolen

It’s suddenly hit me now. Everything. It’s happened, it’s over, it’s in the past and now is the time to face it. That great period of my life, the amazing people I met, the constant stream of things I had to do.

University is over.

I know people always say it, but I am truly horrified it’s over. I can barely contain myself now. I want my friends. I want my campus. I want that freedom. Whatever you call it, freedom or an institution, there was a personal happiness in it. I want the stupidity and the ridicule of every day life with my friends. I want that freedom to look out the window and watch all the students infiltrating our little student town, like little black ants filling up every corner with their stupid, snotty yet warm and down to earth jokes, leaving grubby ink stains in their absence. I want to think of every crush I’ve ever swooned over – pressed my face against the window and followed their stroll across that infamous road outside my house and into the pulsing avenues of my heart. I want, mostly, to know my friends were around me all the time and I could depend on them all the time, to be there, to be near. I want to watch late-night movies at ridiculously late-night hours and then decide at 1am I wanted to eat a doner kebab from Tesco; I want to know that huge clocktower would always be watching over us. I want to go to the cafe and have a nasty breakfast with fake sausages. I want to spend hours in the library making nicknames for the “Library regulars”; I want to share breaks with my friends in the Library cafe and talk about work and guys and religion and that girl’s hair and the swush of coffee and how it was so unfair they told us that and whether to get a cheesecake and how fat we’re getting and how we’ll go for a run after all this and, and, and, the future.

I want to know things could be organised and spontaneous without planning weeks in advance.

Everyone is so busy now. We’ve all moved on. University is over. We all decided to do different things. Everyone is pushing ahead, slugging ahead, not enjoying the journey ahead and yet having to move ahead. What’s this invisible thread pulling us along? Time, and time itself, is pulling us away from the things we love. Adulthood and time.

It’s all over, but we can’t ignore that it’s all moving on.

EDIT: Joan Baez just decided to sing “When Time Is Stolen” on my iTunes.

Song review: “Natural Beauty” by Neil Young

Neil Young's Harvest Moon record, 1992

Whenever I hear this song, I picture a single spotlight on Neil and his browned acoustic guitar, the backing singers and instruments fading in and out on stage in soft, forest greens. The stage is wide and the audience is scattered, taking in the sound and scene with oval eyes, like passers-by observing a true natural beauty in a museum. Everything is dark and musky. The intense sensations of space and sound created by this performance is a true illustration of how live music is always better.

The feeling is overpoweringly forest green and brown, not least because this song discusses the increasingly precarious nature of our environment, and of the true beauty of humankind. That simple yet enormous line, “a natural beauty should be preserved like a monument to nature”. There is something of Neil’s aging wistfulness in this song, he’s the dreamer, he’s the writer; he’s yearning for some attention to detail on the things that matter. As the song echoes and closes the album, the harvest moon finally sets, and you’re left to think about what you have done to make it worthwhile.