| Subject: Love the Pwurg stuff |
Author:
matt
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Date Posted: 16:03:59 12/04/03 Thu
Can I 'fess up to something? My favourite part of this site. First off, let me say - it's a great site. From beginning to end, this site is a masterpiece - I love it in a way that can't simply be explained by the seamlessly professional presentation and the great "branding", or by the consistently high quality of writing (not just by Damon but by the other contributors too - I greatly enjoyed John's account below of being buzzed by the military while fleeing the CRCMH). No, I love this site because it's a labour of love - a huge, rambling, joyful celebration of a shared set of memories about a place which, while unheard of to most, is profoundly special to many.
But my favourite parts of this site are the bits about Pwurg.
Why? It's bizarre, isn't it? I don't know Pwurg, or any of them. F@ck it, I've never even been to Maidenhead, to my recollection anyway, in fact until I read this site I thought it was in Kent (that's Maidstone, of course, fact fans). I stumbled across this website while researching urban exploration. The antics of a post-adolescent band which split up almost ten years ago, local to a part of the country I've never been to, should mean less to me than a rerun of "Eldorado". And yet it means a lot. Why though?
How to explain...
The mind is a funny thing and it only takes a tiny something to jog the memory - what was once forgotten suddenly comes flooding back, all stored, shrink-wrapped, fresh as the day your brain decided it needed more room for the Highway Code or a complete discography of the band Marion* or the Law Society Finals, and decided to send all the rubbish off to storage. Yes, memories are fabulous things, and they're at their best when they're personal, but also shared.
And that's what I love about the Pwurg stuff, I guess. Two guys from the same little town remembering the arsing about they used to get up to, celebrating their daft band, rehashing their teenage in-jokes, revelling in shared memory. It's all the more poignant that they're on different sides of the world now. Stuff like "f*cking airhip" - an incident that occurred ten years ago when an airship mysteriously hung about over the town for ages. Hardly anyone remembers it. It's fair to say that nobody who isn't from Maidenhead has any idea what it's about (I don't), and they probably don't care either - but I do. It's cool, to see memories being delved into, shared memories that only a few people in a certain place are privy to. Of course, you might say, it's all vicarious for me. I don't know these people. I never saw that f*cking airship. I'm just a voyeur. Well, yes and no. It helps that I'm the same age as these guys and from a small town and can connect all this with the nonsense that I used to get up to and the own stories I remember from a decade ago. But more to the point, my distance from it all adds another level of poignancy. It reminds you how big things are, how infinite and chaotic is humanity. All over the country, a million, two million people in their late twenties have memories of arsing about in 1994 with their friends from school. We were all doing this stuff, simultaneously, unconnected yet exactly the same, in the days before we got jobs and kids and carved new lives for ourselves. There are people thinking Pwurgesque thoughts about all the daft sh*t they used to get up to, all over the country. And they don't know each other, but sometimes, as with this website, they're afforded a glimpse. The whole world has memories like these; well, perhaps not quite as psychedelic, but sometimes nearly. It's just that Pwurg have committed them to a website which is ostensibly about an old abandoned hospital.
FOOTNOTE
*whose album track "Vanessa" remains the only good song EVER to contain a Christian name in the title. Ever. Factoso.
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