Going through my twenty-year old blog, I was interested to find this list of loves and hates. I've changed my mind on many of them, while with others I feel exactly the same today.
First, I listed the hate. Comments from Present Me in italics.
1) Travel bores. No change.
2) Travel-writers/writing. No change.
3) People who dilly-dally in queues. No change.
4) People who walk slowly in front of you in a narrow passage-way. No change.
5) Sideways (movie). I was too hard on this. It wasn't a bad movie, I just found its cult irritating.
6) Shrek (movie). I can't even remember why I put this on the list.
7) People using “oh” when they mean “zero” or “nought”. No change.
8) Bob Dylan. I'm not sure why I put Bob Dylan down. Probably, again, because of his cult. I don't know a lot of his songs even today, but the ones I know, I like. And he seems like a good guy.
9) Republicans/Unionists. I've completely changed my mind about this. If republican means "res publica" (the common good), I consider myself a republican, and even an Irish republican-- despite my fondness for monarchy. As for the unionists, I've come to greatly admire them for their loyalty to their heritage. Basically, in our socially atomised and banalised society, I tend to admire anyone who cares about heritage or national loyalty.
10) Robert de Niro. I don't have strong feelings about him now and wonder why I put him on the list.
11) Jack Nicholson. I've come to like him a lot.
12) Sneering, mean-spirited humour, no matter how funny. Prime example: The Simpsons. I still hold by the principle, although I would no longer accuse the Simpsons of this.
13) Anti-semitism posing as liberalism. I still hate anti-semitism, but I've also become wary of accusing anyone of prejudice-- it's such an easy charge to make, and such promiscuous accusations are the bread and butter of political correctness/woke.
14) Most of the poetry of Dylan Thomas. I no longer feel so strongly about this, and I wonder why I ever felt strongly enough to put it on the list.
15) Parents who let their children run in the supermarket. I've changed my mind about this. I still find it irritating, but childhood obesity has become such a problem that I can't find it in my heart to complain about children running.
16) Anti-Englishness. I've become a lot more tolerant of this. i'm an anglophile all the way through, but national prejudices make the world more interesting-- if they don't got too far.
17) Church-bashing. Well, I still hate this, though I might be indulgent in particular cases. This was written when I was an agnostic.
18) People who exaggerate their Dublin accents to sound more street-wise/tough/working-class. I've become more tolerant of this. Insofar as it adds to local distinctiveness, it's good.
19) People who pull you up for saying “tomorrow” when, for example, you refer to Wednesday afternoon as tomorrow at 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning. I would find this to be an amusing quirk today.
20) Confrontational people. I still feel this way-- mostly-- but sometimes confrontation is admirable.
21) Studied bohemianism. Again, I would find this more endearing than annoying today-- anything that adds to the colour of life.
22) Post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, New Historicism etc. I've come to think that postmodernism has something going for and is, to some extent, a genuine description of a cultural and social phenomenon. The rest is all nonsense. Mostly endearing nonsense, but post-colonialism feeds into the "sacred victim" and "oppressor-oppressed" menatality that has wreacked havoic in our world.
23) Lotteries. I still feel the same way.
25) Cars. I've completely changed my mind on this one, and I've come to see the romance of cars.
26) The servility of dogs, in contrast to the dignity of cats. Honestly, this baffles me. I like both dogs and cats, and loyalty is probably the virtue I admire the most. This must have been a temporary hang-up.
I followed this up with a list of things I loved. Again, I add comments in italics.
1) Poetry of W.B. Yeats. No change.2) Poetry of Philip Larkin. No change.
3) Quentin Tarantino movies. No change, although I didn't like Django Unchained, and I haven't loved his later works as much as I did everything up to Kill Bill.
4) The cinema in general. No change.
5) Snow. No change.
6) Horror movies/books. No change.
7) The students in UCD. No change.
8) Spaghetti Bolognese. No change, although it's been overtaken by steak and chips as my favourite meal.
9) Winter and Autumn, esp. October. No change.
10) Train stations. No change.
11) The English language. No change.
12) Englishness in general. No change.
13) Jewish culture in general. No change, although I'm less confident I have any real knowledge of it.
14) Led Zeppelin. No change.
15) The Victorian Era. No change.
16) The King James Bible. No change.
17) The sea. Who doesn't love the sea? But I admit I sometimes find it dispiriting, in certain circumstances. I've lived five minutes from the sea for the last few years.
18) Evocative phrases like “The cold light of day”, “All human life is there”, “Softly-falling snow” and many, many others. No change. Although I've come to realize that getting overly excited about this doesn't get a good reaction in some social situations.
19) Darkness. No change.
20) Billboards, especially glowing billboards on a lonely night. No change.
21) Tea. No change, although to be honest I drink coffee more.
22) Puns, especially excruciatingly bad ones. No change.
23) Silence and quiet. I'm surprised to see this here. Who doesn't love a bit of silence and quiet now and then? But personally, I much prefer a good bit of noise and activity around me.
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