Like many people, I discovered Pink Floyd in my teens. Floyd songs featured heavily on the tapes I used to play in my car when driving to uni, and Time was always one of my favourites.And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you – genius lyrics, I always thought. Until one day you listen to that song and it’s true, and those genius lyrics become acute in all the wrong ways.
This song rolled around on shuffle recently, and those oh-so-familiar lyrics that I had happily sung along to so many times, nodding sagaciously at their profundity, suddenly became a bullet of ice in my chest: I have achieved no more than that half a page of scribbled lines in the oh-my-god-fifteen years since I first heard those lyrics.
I’ve always eschewed five-year plans and the such like, because the randomness of the world has always made them seem irrelevant; but in a Floydian epiphanic moment, I’ve realised that it is the randomness of I that has always made them irrelevant.
I am not one for New Year’s resolutions, and I won’t be dressing up my decisions in such gimcrack threads; but the end-of-year period does often become a time of solitary reflection and realisation, and – whether it roughly coincides with the New Year or not – I will be embarking on a one-year plan. This is goodbye to the English way.
Because I do really think I’ve something more to say.
