Just Seventeen.


It was while I was out for a birthday meal at Hermitage Road in Hitchin last night that I realised I’d also spent my seventeenth birthday in the same building, competing in the final of a Battle of the Bands competition – and that the gig had taken place exactly half my lifetime ago.


It’s strange to think that something I remember so clearly, which happened on the cusp of adulthood, could be such a large fraction of my life ago. I know I’m hardly decrepit, but it was still a wake-up call. I would never have guessed that I'd be there seventeen years later, having dinner with my wife; partly because in 1998 it was a dank, dingy club, and not the sort of place you’d want to eat in.

The phrase ‘wake-up call’ makes this realisation sound negative, when it was actually pleasing to note. When you’re seventeen, you don’t think that far in the future. You’ve no idea how things will turn out. I’d only just left school and started college, which was when I started to grow up. My life was at a transition point. It’s nice to look back from an adult perspective, even if at thirty-four, I still feel like I’m pretending.

It may interest you to know, incidentally, that my band won the contest. We were dubbed Best Band in Hertfordshire 1998, which ended up being a bit of a poisoned chalice. 


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