I suddenly remembered, the other day, something from 30 years ago. I was in my final year of my Bachelors degree at art school, and nearing the end of the course, and the world was electric. My final year of that degree was a big one for me in all kinds of ways — aside from the stress of will I get my degree or have I screwed up and wasted the last four years of my life?, there were also the facts that I spent much of the year in my first proper extended relationship (which went south before too long for reasons that were as much “I didn’t know what I was doing” than anything else; I was a bad boyfriend), I was slowly beginning to realize that maybe I wanted to be a writer instead of a graphic designer or visual artist, and I was dealing with the fact that, because it was the last year of my degree, I’d soon be saying goodbye to people I’d grown close to over the past four years and didn’t quite know how to deal with any of that.
In the middle of all of this, the music scene of the time was in flux in ways that felt exciting and explosive — part of it was that Britpop was dying although we didn’t necessarily realize it at the time, and the death throes were offering up some of the more interesting music of the movement, but there was also the truth that I was looking outside of my relatively narrow parameters of the previous few years and finding things I’d ignored or never discovered at all years prior. Added up, it felt like the perfect soundtrack to a life that felt perpetually in motion at the time.
The thing I remembered was checking my bank balance in the town center, and seeing that I had, essentially no money. I literally had just over ten pounds and I knew no money would be coming in for at least a couple of weeks, and I needed groceries and, you know, money to just get by. Instead of doing any of those things, I withdrew ten pounds and went to buy an album for myself — Supergrass‘s In It For The Money, perhaps ironically given the title — entirely secure that I was making the right decision and everything else would fall into place and be fine.
Here’s the thing: I was right. Things did fall into place, and everything was fine. And the opening three songs off that album were exactly what I needed to hear at that point in my life, and I made the right decision, at the time and even looking back now. But when I remembered all of this, the thought came to me not that I was dumb and should’ve bought food or whatever, but that I miss that utter sense of security and belief in the universe that everything would work out. Remember when you could make bargains with life like that and they’d pay off?