I happened to catch sight of Venus as a brilliant -4 magnitude evening star this evening as I made my trip to Pizza Hut. It set me thinking; Venus does almost exactly 13 orbits for eight of the Earth’s, so every eight years we see Venus in the same place over again. So what was I doing the last time Venus was a bright evening star in the spring?

In Spring 1996 my political career in Northern Ireland peaked, with the IRA bombing Canary Wharf, elections called to start the negotiation process, and suddenly my knowledge of matters psephological became hugely relevant to politics; I flew for a day to London (accompanied by the then party chairman) for a meeting with Sir Patrick Mayhew and Michael Ancram to put the Alliance Party view, and had the weird experience of returning a call from a minister in the Dublin government from a payphone in Heathrow airport. My Ph D thesis, in contrast, failed to progress much. Anne and I started talking seriously about babies.

In Spring 1988 my long relationship with my then girlfriend was lurching to a close; we were still going out but no longer sleeping together. It took me until December to pull the plug, but I was finding myself thinking about my good friend Anne in new ways that took several years to work through to their conclusion. My political career in Cambridge was just getting started as I got elected to the college JCR committee as external officer in April. I was president of the Cambridge University Diplomacy Society; my predecessor, who had founded it, is now Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Turkmenistan.

In Spring 1980 my family was living in the Netherlands for a year. I was about to hit puberty and consumed with lust for Vera who sat next to me. I’ve completely lost touch with everyone I knew then, apart from one friend whose father had a sabbatical at the same institute as mine; he (my friend that is) is now a lawyer in New York. As far as I can tell from Google the lovely Vera appears to have become a doctor. My two best friends from school are also trackable: one has gone into his father’s carpet business and the other has moved to Scotland where she is a social worker running the local athletics club.

In Spring 1972 the worst months of the Troubles were raging between Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday, but I was pretty much unaware of it and more concerned with my baby sister born in October. It’s funny, people sometimes ask me if I was affected by growing up in Belfast when I did, but to be honest it seems a rather stupid question because everyone is affected by the place where they grow up. I suppose it is a euphemism for asking if anyone close to me was killed or hideously maimed, which is not something I would usually discuss with casual acquaintances anyway. Funny to reflect that F is now about the same age I was then, since I was 32 when he was born…

So what were you doing 8, 16, 24, 32, 40 years ago? Post it to your lj and let’s see if we can make this the next meme!