Time Travel

McFly! McFly! McFly!

I’m currently sorting through the detritus of my life as I prepare to rent my flat out and it has been like travelling back in time. You see I’m a hoarder. I can’t let things go ‘just in case’. I’m also paranoid about throwing out bills and receipts in case the tax man will need them. As a result I am unearthing receipts from dinners and cinema trips from years ago with people I no longer see.

But the biggest time travel moment was finding notebooks with bits of stories, ideas from years ago (some back when I was a teenager). As I read those bits and pieces I am transported back to a different part of my life. Reminding me of what I’d been thinking then. Hazy memories sharpened by biro strokes. It also shocked me how much writing I was doing before I considered myself 'a writer'.

I found my teenage poetry and the beginning of my first novel in one notebook. The heartbreak of University in another. And then fast forwarding ten years to a miserable nine months I spent at the job from hell… I’d been obsessed with Buffy and was playing around with writing a book. There in the notebook was my idea for a book on witches. Charmed meets Sex and The City. I hadn’t realised how much I’d written of it.

And then there were the snippets of ideas, revisiting past characters and with it the past me. And in between all those writing notes there are also ‘to do’ lists, shopping lists and packing lists for holidays and trips. I looked down one list for my first trip to Nashville and suddenly I was there again. Happy, bouncing, agog with it all.

I have taken those notebooks and stored them in a plastic container to protect those nuggets, those parts of my past. I have set aside a small section of them that hold stories that I want to revisit so I can spend this summer working on them.

I might not have a DeLorean with a flux capacitor but I do have pen and paper.