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I really enjoyed reading this, thank you.

I'm lucky enough or maybe unfortunate enough to have lived through a number of 'scenes' if you can call them that. For me I don't think you really recognise them for what they are, until they have passed. You have a vague awareness of something significant happening at the time, but it isn't immediately obvious until you have that juxtaposition to bring it into sharp focus. Perversely, the zeitgeist is only identifiable once it has passed - an irony if there ever was one. I only recently discovered the synth wave scene, which is something that I have really fallen in love with, but it's an ersatz romanticism of an era and a music scene created by a generation that never lived it. However, it resonates with me in a way that it didn't when I was actually living it in the 80's, and it evokes a level of nostalgia beyond what it probably should. I think this is because it hits hard at a part of me that yearns for something that never was - simultaneously dismissive of the feelings it evokes, and fully in love with them too, whatever the truth of the lived experience at the time. With hindsight, age brings a clarity to the vigour and excitement of your younger years, that you took for granted at the time, and an essential part of that is the juxtaposition between your later life experiences and those of your early ones. I think that if I were to show you yourself in twenty years time, you would witness someone who recognised with agonising clarity that the younger you were once part of a scene yourself, something that people half your age would be trying to emulate in the future present, but you just didn't know it at the time. As a stranger looking in, I can say with some confidence that you are indeed in the eye of a scene, but only time will distill it down to it's essential essence, with the crucible of juxtaposition forging the experience into purest nostalgia, to be revealed one day, when the time is right, as a glorious and beautiful retrospective of life lived in brightest technicolour during a scene that you weren't sure was real. Thanks again for taking the time to record your thoughts on life.

Martin

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