Lines on a young man's photograph album

You might infer from the title that I am about to do something wonderfully Proustian (or, to coin a term, Larkinian) and significant. I'm not. I apologise in advance but the following will just be a few seemingly irrelevant observations and so anybody not up for my usual predilection for the banal should give the game up right now... then again, who am I apologising to? This is, after all, my little piece of digital space (to advance upon a turn of phrase I picked up from The New Yorker) and if you're expecting anything even vaguely linear or literary then let me restate for the record: this is something more akin to a public diary.

'Oh Neil, why should it be public? You're so boring!'

Well, not because of any personal vanity if that's what you're thinking; it's just I know that if it were not on the Internet, and therefore at least having the hope of being read by someone, I'd give up the whole damn project and that would be a crying shame (for me) as it's such good practice for my... ahem... writing skills. I've kept little diaries before or, rather, I haven't kept them.

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By happy coincidence, it turns out that the melancholy beauty of The Shins' song, 'New Slang' perfectly fits fifty photographs- in terms of timing, I mean- good for a Youtube video or a memorial slideshow. I found this out quite by accident however, and not, as you might naturally have been forced to conclude, owing to any over-indulgence of the sentimentally morbid on my part. Over the last few days I have been compiling some photographs on the computer- the fifty best- in order to transfer them from purely digital to corporeal reality. In a world like ours, so uncompromisingly paperless, I think that it's nice to have your memories all together in one spot and unfettered by Facebook (where most of them have been stored up until now).

For the record, I don't think that I would much like The Shins' music at my funeral. Although they're a wonderful band they are also a little too mass-market for my tastes, at least with regard to my final farewell. No, I think that I'd prefer The Prodigy's 'Firestarter', if I were being cremated or, failing that, something from my old friend Joe Jackson or maybe the Randy Newman song from Toy Story, the one they play when Buzz realises that he is not a Space Ranger after all, just a toy.

My pictures are wonderful: there's Killarney, Colombia University, Venice; so many places that I'd rather be seeing, things I'd rather be doing. In fact, isn't it the ultimate irony of the holiday snap that your mood on the day that it was taken no longer matters? There are a fair few photographs where I actually know that my disposition was less tolerable then than the rather bored mini-malaise of the present moment, sitting here updating my notes as a distraction from Kingston essays.

Still, even with knowledge of the transience of the ideal at the very forefront, aware that I was too hot or too cold or a little underwhelmed or whatever, I would rather be back there, in that moment of real significance and in the precise mood pictured, however disagreeable. A primal instinct in favour of the vacation wins out against my power to reason and forgive me but I can't help liking this, irrational creature that I am! I wonder what such a state of affairs says about the human condition though, or, at least, the human condition when in Surbiton...

Maybe it means that I just need a holiday.