Pillow Talk

Who needs tardises when we've got bedrooms?

Yesterday I lost some things, and the last place I remembered having them was my bedroom. So to find them...I had tidy up my room. Like the song says, I still haven't found what I'm looking for. But I've found a lot more.

This is the periodic table of the elements.

 It hung on a wall when I was nine or ten, and I spent hours studying it. I knew Tom Lehrer's Elements Song before I'd heard of the Gilbert & Sillivan song it was based on.

There's Antinomy and Arsenic, Aluminium, Selenium
And Hydrogen and Oxygen and Nitrogen and Rhenium
And Nickel, Neodymium, Neptunium, Germanium
And Iron, Americium, Ruthenium, Uranium...


There's Gold and Protactinium...

Now, after an hour's work with carpet tape on the back and invisible selotape on the front, it's patched up and above this computer, stuck to the wall with an unopened packet of blu-tack I also found.

There was also a big cardboard box full of printouts. Articles and whole books I'd printed out to read later.

In, erm, 1992.

Twenty years ago. Mostly on the artificial languages that I spent the early years of the internet learning far too much about. I've occasionally come across them in the intervening years and made a mental note to read them sometime. Well this time...I borrowed a shredding machine. Which broke down three times turning twenty years of vague promises into three binbags of paper strips.

I quickly made a dozen PDFs of the more interesting documents, which I fully intend to read...sometime.

Oh, and speaking of the early years of the internet, and a time when Windows 95 was the exciting new update of Windows 3.1....

Before there was there forums of A-O-Hell, there were the forums of Compuserve.

And before there was 24-hour broadband, there were special offers of a month's dial-up.

There was MP3.COM too, which enabled be to download in this amazing new audio format that would sometimes fit onto a 3.25" disc. Still, not everything changes. Journalistic standards are as high as ever.

 
Next to a perfectly servicable pair of shoes that I haven't seen in over a year, were three rucksacks...and most of my home gymnasium.

 
And finally...this is a pillow case.

Star Wars came out in 1978, when I was six. Which means before I was ten, I was sleeping on a George Lucas movie poster. And even then, Luke Skywalker's bare chest was more interesting than Princess Leia's bust. Though I don't recall either from the actual film.

This cloth bag has been in a cupboard for three decades. Which means the other themed bedclothes have probably been sitting in a different cupboard for the same time.

But tonight, I'm sleeping among the stars again.

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Update: I found what I was looking for. It wasn't in the bedroom.