Missed it

Damn and blast. Twice today I have failed to notice 7:07:07 07.07.07 as it flashed past. The first time was excusable, I was still in bed after having had difficulty falling asleep last night; but seventeen minutes ago I was right here faffing about, with a clock staring me in the face. Bah.

I did take note of 12:34 5.6.78, although not by my own efforts. I was a first-year student, drowsing lightly in a seminar with a half-dozen others, when the door flew open and the senior tutor rushed in to tell us the time.

1:23:45 6.7.89 passed me by completely, I cannot even work out where I would have been on that day, the summer before the Berlin Wall fell. 12:34:56 7.8.90 is as much of a mystery to me now. Only young children—and the very lucky—alive today will see 1:23 4.5.67

I wish now that I'd kept a diary in earlier years, because much of my life is now somehow unavailable to me. I cannot remember, I simply have not the vaguest idea, what I was doing, where I was working and living, at those times; and there are also many vivid images, memories of strange isolated instants, that I cannot place in time. Why would I have been sitting in a little red bus on a midday in early summer, in a traffic jam on the King's Road, opposite a pub where a young woman was setting out a chalkboard with the lunch menu on the pavement; which summer was that, and why on earth do I remember that scene?

I have kept diaries at various stages of my life, for more or less short periods of time, usually when I was deeply unhappy and (felt that I) had nobody to talk to; which is odd because one thing I am now sure of is that my life has been full of friends, or people who would gladly have become friends if I had let them get close to me. But I didn't trust them, because I didn't like myself enough to be confident of their motives: surely they were only trying to get within stiletto-striking range?