The Greatest Moments in my Life

Do you remember when the human race wasn’t constantly staring at a six-inch illuminated piece of glass and a time when the vibrating tapping sound of a small device trying to dance itself across a table top was not even a thing. If you cannot remember those days, then I must confess that the sentiment I’m about to unpack here probably will not resonate with you. Not because you can’t appreciate the past, but that constant noise of beeping and buzzing is just what you know, rather than a state to which we’ve slowly become acclimatised to.

As is often with my writing, I’m not capturing my new thoughts, because this is another concept or articulation that I devised when I was much younger – but only just now finding the time to write it down. Back in those good olde days of the 1990’s, the decade in which I became of age. I became a teenager in the first year of that decade and exited that ten year tunnel of youth with a firm trajectory and mostly formulated values. It’s well known that those were the years that shaped who we are, however it is not just the transition and march of time that defines the adults we are to become, but our environment plays a pivotal role, and for me it was the happenings that the nineteen nineties offered up. I’ve often referred to that era as the first anonymous decade, but I’ll explain that in another passage some day. Of course, for most of us we can define an era by the pop culture and news stories, so it’s not quite ambiguous, but as I say I’ll explain my theory on that another time.

So back in the early nineties, I had begun making some good friends, many of which still hold a firm position in my life today. Living in a middle-class overgrown village just outside of London, these friends and I would often be allowed gatherings at one another’s houses on a Friday or Saturday night, we weren’t quite old enough to visit the local pubs – not that we waited until we were absolutely legal before doing that. We had no mobile phones, but we did have access to our families landlines, do you remember those?

We would often spend hours in an evening chatting on our household phones, speaking to the friends that we perhaps only saw a few hours ago. The usual pattern would be that many of us would meet outside the local train station on a school day. Many of my friends got a private bus to their school and would disembark by the station, and a couple more of us, me included would arrive back from our schools by train, so it became a natural congregating point. We would hang out for a short while there, not too long as our parents would quickly be concerned if we had returned home within an unacceptable tolerance. We would just jibber jabber about what seemed like vitally important things, often just masquerading as silliness or sometimes crude attempts at flirting with the girls. My circle of friends back then, which we somewhat unoriginally called ‘The Group’ was comprised of about 10 core participants, six girls and four boys. Most of us had met at the local tennis club, none of us were budding sports athletes, but the local club had a Friday juniors’ night, so it was a regular place to let your children spend a few hours socialising, similar to an inner-city youth club. At this point, I’m reminded how good we had it, we were all from fortunate backgrounds living in this large village come small town, all going to a mix of good schools, some private, some grammar and lonely old me going to a north London comprehensive school.

We would hang out innocently around the train station for about 20-30mins before heading off in sub-groups of those who lived in the same direction and eventually home for dinner, homework and of course the desperate need to ring each other to converse further.

Looking back on it now, I wonder why many of us felt the need to phone each other only minutes after an adhoc social gathering had dispersed. But evaluating that now as a grown adult in a world of instant communication, our human need for connection has never changed, just our tools back then were primitive in comparison to today.

I recall a strange occurrence that many of us would do, if some revelation within ‘The Group’ had got out, perhaps the admission that someone had a crush on someone else, some of us would ring around everyone to see if other household landlines were being used. Our phone lines would often receive a burst of connection, a ‘one ring’ to check if someone was using the phone and who they might be on the phone to. Looking back this was a bizarre undertaking, if for example Lisa had just told Jane something, why would Lisa then think minutes later that Rachel’s line being engaged must be the digital version of a wildfire or grapevine – it’s not like those phone lines were used by others, maybe the grown adults who owned them? I must also confess, that although my little example named some of the girls (not their real names by the way), but us boys were equally guilty of this rather obsessive controlling attempt to know what each of us were doing and shamefully I occasionally participated. I’m sure it really annoyed all our parents too.

But the ‘one ring’ craze aside, our telephone lines were our lifeline, our connection to each other that extended beyond physical gatherings, be that outside the train station or our ‘evenings in’ on a weekend. The cable coming from that little white box on the wall wasn’t just transmitting pulsating digital signals, but morphed into the manifestation of an actual umbilical cord. In most of our households the use of the telephone had to be limited, our parents would restrict the number of outgoing calls we could make, perhaps because of the cost or perhaps because it meant we were not doing our homework. I even remember the tutting and eyerolling when I received an incoming call too. As if it was my fault that someone rang me, as if the time limit my parents enforced on me somehow had to govern a threshold that others had to follow too.

Making a phone call back then often took planning, asking for permission or deciding who and when you would call within your permitted allowance. Rarely did these phones have speed dial buttons and if they did it was often a rapid connection to your grandparents or your mum’s best friend. You had to remember everyone’s numbers – thankfully all of us being in the same town meant it was only six numbers that had to be recalled. And then the worst bit, the fear that it wouldn’t be your friend that picked up. You would have to politely ask their parents if you could speak to them – this was doubly mortifying when you were calling one of the girls, having to ask their scary father if you could talk to their precious daughter. And then there was the embarrassment of ringing your friend, plucking up the courage to ask to speak to them, only for their parent to sometimes say “No, not right now, they’re not allowed to use the phone at the moment” – what had they done to be banned from using the phone and had I somehow added to the weight to whatever misadventure had bestowed this temporary banishment.

When that ringing sound bounced around your house, we all immediately thought it must be for me. We rushed to wherever the nearest device was – remembering it was attached to a wall somewhere. I would leap up, run to the phone, dodging all the furniture and other humans in the house, it was my destiny to answer this call, I had to claim this moment and answer the phone, hopefully whilst not panting and heavy breathing from the sudden exercise of that chase. Only for that sinking feeling when it was not for you, it was your dad’s business partner, or your mum’s friend or worse when you had answered the phone and it was your grandparents – don’t get me wrong I cherished my grandparents, but you had to make small talk with them before handing the handset over to your mum or dad. You were disappointed that it was not one of your friends and then you had to undertake mild chit-chat with your dotting grandma who loves to hear your voice, but you just want to disappear back into whatever it was you were doing before that false alarm of social connection.

When you did leap into action and managed to answer your phone without a shortness of breath, when it was actually one of your dear friends, it was an amazing feeling – not to the point where you sang or rejoiced in that moment, but perhaps later, maybe years later. When you reflected on the special connection and meaningfulness that your friends have in your life. The feeling that you were included in a human web of belonging to each other in some way.

If you’re still reading this, you may have been wondering where I have been leading this text and what is the correlation between the title and my teenage ramblings about telecommunication back in the 1990’s, what exactly were the greatest moments in my life? Many of you will now jump to the conclusion that the great moment must be the point in which I answered a phone from one of my friends. If that was your guess, then I will inform you that you are not quite right, but you are close. You are just 5 seconds off the mark.

For me, the greatest moments in my life were five seconds before my phone rang. A moment I clearly knew nothing about and a moment that I can only award in retrospect. Five seconds before your phone rang, someone, somewhere was thinking about you enough to want to speak to you. What a simple and powerful thought that is, that you have made an impact on someone else’s life to the point they want to share more moments with you and you with them. That someone has a longing to speak to you, that you have created a passive reaction, that seconds before that ringing is heard, you were in their thoughts. Wow, what a truly wonderful feeling that was and one that has me welling up as I try to finish this passage. How much I adored my teenage friends, even if at times we fell out with each other, but what we were to each other will differ and some of us will not embrace those memories in the same way I do, but I would like to think that all of us, regardless of where our journeys have taken us will still hold a special place in those foundation steps that leapt us all forward.

Back to today’s connected world, with our endless notifications, text messages, email alerts and vibrating smartphones, those great moments I once held so dear are now dissolved in a sea of digital and thoughtlessness. But if you still want to, the greatest moments in your life are still there, just listen out for someone special reaching towards you, and hopefully seconds later your phone will start ringing.