Rowan Tree and Red Thread

sammywol gave me 1999 as the year for my 'Where Was I' year in this meme. Free association and other ramblings follow. Feel free to request a year of your very own in comments if you like.

Any memory exercise is difficult for me, as I seem to have a particularly poor memory. Or at least it takes a lot of prodding and reforming connections to get anything back out from the (not so) distant past. 1999, however, should be an easier one, as it's less than a decade ago and it's a landmark year in a lot of ways. Unfortunately it's also in that period between my keeping a paper journal and moving to a regular electronic journal so my usual crutches aren't there. As you'll see Wikipedia has supplied some of the news events as I try to create framework to hang my fragmentary memories on.

The most important thing that happened in 1999 was moving to Cork, I reckon. sammywol and I got our first place together, at Iona Hall, and enjoyed our first year of married life. We were not deterred by the awful flower-print fabric on the three piece suite in the living room, or the river of condensation on the bedroom window. It was a place we could call our own and it worked out pretty well.

I'd sort of already moved down to Cork before Christmas, but 1999 really began with starting my new job in Alcatel on January 4th. This was a complete change for me, moving as I was from academic research to software testing in the mobile phone network biz. I remember the year as one of a lot of learning new things, and bizarrely returning to France almost immediately, as I attended training courses in Lannion in February. It was strange to be working in Alcatel in many ways. My co-workers were for the most part graduates and a lot younger than me, and their concerns of GAA matches, Thursday night drinking outings and buying Alfa Romeos never really made sense to me. Luckily I did make a couple of friends at work who read SF, one who played RPGs, and gradually formed a circle of friends with whom I could have a conversation that didn't involve hurling. Even in my first year at Alcatel there were mutterings about the future of the place, my journal tells me, and there were problems holding onto employees who jumped ship in the IT boom. A couple of years later and things were not so rosy.

To my surprise, 1999 didn't involve a nuclear explosion on the moon, nor did the UK get invaded by the Volgs. Pluto did flee to the outer regions of the solar system, and I witnessed a damp squib of a total solar eclipse on August 11th. For this last, I remember standing with co-workers at the loading bay at Alcatel looking out at the teeming rain and grey skies. Cork's weather has been consistent, I'll give it that.

Wikipedia tells me that 1999 was the year that the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander were lost, while the crash of the Lunar Prospector into the Moon's surface was both deliberate and successful in detecting frozen water on the surface. Kosovo was constantly in the news and April saw the Columbine High School massacre. 1999 was the year that the UN declared the world population to have passed 6 billion, saw George W. Bush run for the US Presidency, and the end of the year scared us all with the countdown to the Y2K bug. There were also impressive anti-globalisation demonstrations in Seattle for the WTO meeting.

In September for our 1st anniversary sammywol and I went to Glasgow for a belated honeymoon. We visited friends near St. Andrews, had a brief visit to Edinburgh, and spent about a week in Glasgow, I think. This was a lovely holiday and it's hard to pick the highlight, but I remember the glorious Burrell Collection, with its mad mixture of beautiful artefacts from every corner of the earth, and the amazing Tudor carved wooden ceiling in particular. We lay on our back on the bench in that room for quite a while picking out details. This Glasgow trip also stands out for our jungle trek to find Bothwell Castle and associated starvation, visiting the Rennie Macintosh house, a Waterstones on 4 floors (I think) with couches and a dangerously appealing selection of books, and the Loon Fung Chinese restaurant where much stuffing of faces took place. I seem to remember a Mexican place too, with a dish called something like Los Borachos Por Dos. As we were celebrating the fact that we were one year 'dos', it seemed churlish not to scoff the lot. Curiously we didn't discover Glasgow's true culinary delight (Little India) until our second visit for the 2005 Worldcon.

In 1999 we met Pete, alaimacerc and marzut and formed our merry gaming band. Our first sessions took place at Iona Hall, on the amazing sliding cushions of those appalling chairs and couch. I can remember alaimacerc ending the night half-sitting on the floor as his natural supine posture exaggerated the cushion collapse and slowly fed him out of the seat and onto the floor. Those three have become good friends, and I'm happy to say that we're still getting together each week to argue in imaginary worlds.

In summary then, 1999 was the year sammywol and I established ourselves as a married couple, found a home, and adapted to new work and new circumstances. It really was a turning point for me, as the two years living in Paris seem now in retrospect to have been marking time. Moving home to Ireland meant leaving astronomy and research. It seemed like a big decision at the time, but one with only really one answer. Two years away from sammywol was unfun, and there was no way I was going to stick with a career that meant more moving around every few years, scrabbling after a permanent post without guarantees for the rest of my thirties.

1999 was also the year I heard one of my favourite jokes.

A man, very drunk, gets up from his seat at the bar and staggers out into the night.

Weaving his way home he spies across the street a nun in full habit approaching along the other side of the road.

With a roar, he launches himself across the road, dodging traffic to barrel into the poor nun.

He plants a solid blow upside her head, and knocks her to the ground.

"Aha!" he cries, "Not so tough now, eh Batman?"

And, I have to admit, like the old fogey I am, at no point in the year did I actually party like it was 1999. Ah well.