“She Will Remember Being Me, But What She is I Cannot See” – Catherine Butler

Me - a fairly recent sighting

“Look, you middle-aged creep, when are you going to stop pestering me with these pompous letters and get on with your own boring life?”

I’ve never been a big fan of those “Letter to my younger self” articles you sometimes see in the magazines. I’m sure they don’t mean to, but when read through the filter of my resentful teenage self (a filter ever wondrously to hand), they come across as patronising and smug. “Having achieved a state of Bodhisattva-style enlightenment and encompassed all the ambitions that to you are as yet distant dreams, I have taken time out of my day to bestow on you the inestimable benefit of my wisdom and experience. Be happy and rejoice, young one, for one day you will turn into me!”

I’m sure that’s not what the authors have in mind, but to my teenage ears (more mulish even than Bottom’s were asinine), that’s what they seem to say. Had I received such a letter, I imagine that I would have replied very much in the terms sketched out at the top of this post. (Surprisingly few writers have noticed this inter-generational to-and-fro, but I recommend the opening section of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, which features a spirited exchange between the middle-aged narrator and the boy he used to be, as a model of its kind.)

I’ve mellowed a bit over the years, and these days feel far more kindly toward my future self, who by now has become quite elderly. I don’t wish to speak of her harshly, let alone scold her for sending pontificating letters. It’s just her way, I say, sotto voce. Everyone likes to feel useful, after all. Smile, nod and ignore. How I’ve changed!

Thoughts of the past and future are particularly appropriate today, because, after 10 eventful years and about 120 posts, this will be my final (regular) appearance as an ABBA blogger. It’s a wrench, but I’ve just become the editor of an academic journal (Children’s Literature in Education), and that’s a time-consuming occupation for someone who already has a day job. Something had to give. (Oh! Oh! I also have a coruscating book forthcoming: Literary Studies Deconstructed: A Polemic. Do rush out and buy it, if only for old time’s sake.)

I’ll still be blogging, though! Feel free to come and see me on the Livejournal/Dreamwidth blog, “Don’t Eat With Your Mouth Full,” where I go by the name of Steepholm, a tribute to the island that inspired Calypso Dreaming. I’ve been on that blog even longer than this one… And of course, I’ll still be reading and commenting here. So, altogether I don’t feel (as Pepys did in his last entry) that “I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave.” Wring out those hankies and wave them instead!

I’ve been browsing through my past entries and wondering which might constitute a kind of ABBA Top Three to leave you with; but these things are very subjective, so in the end I’ve chosen just one – simply because it’s also a useful resource for any children’s writers who happen to find themselves in the 1960s after a Life on Mars-style time-slip mishap.

Bookmark the Amazing Patented Title Generator: you may need it.