Aging

I met someone yesterday who I hadn’t seen for about nine years. Andrew was president of the Oxford Reform Club when I was social secretary in 1998. Inexplicably, no online record of that termcard exists, but one for the term before does. He’s just cropped up the BBC, working for us on partnership ideas for the sector as part of Ofcom's PSB Review

This has given me a jolt about aging. I'm pretty relaxed about aging itself. I have no real qualms about the approaching slew of 30th birthdays, nor all the weddings, though the babies are a little terrifying. However, what struck me was how much has changed in the last nine years. Of course, I have been working for eight years, and with Anna for seven; I've even been doing my doctorate for two, though that's problematic on a number of levels.

But that isn't very interesting. What is is the change in interests. I like to think that I've been pretty static in terms of fundamentals since 1999/2000, but, and this is the advantage of having databases for everything, it turns out that's nonsense.

I could prove this in terms of politics (because I am so much more left wing now) or friends (over half of my friendships date from post-2000), but it's more striking to think about what I hadn't got or read in 2000. Then, my library had:

- Not a single work on the early church - I read Chadwick' History of the Early Church in 2001, which I have blogged about before. I'm doing my doctorate on it now
- No travel literature, Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain was the first thing I read (also 2001). I have about 60 of them now.
- Obviously a smattering of history, but no memoir until James Lees-Milne's Ancient as the Hills (2002)
- No formal theology. the first one I bought was Moltmann's The Crucified God (2003)
- An astonishingly limited selection of fiction. Over three quarters of my books were science fiction, fantasy or children's (this last, mostly the complete Chalet School series). I had no Fitzgerald, no Greene (though I had read a couple of my parents'), no Pamuk, Solzhenitsyn, Steinbeck, Trollope or Waugh. And this is just a partial list.
- They're not all positive developmentst: then, thankfully, I had no books on Buddhism

Sometimes I think I have dissipated my talents and failed to build a career effectively over the last eight years. Writing this, I am convinced that it was time well spent.