The great essayist Susan Sontag predicted the age of Instagram when she wrote that today everything exists to end up in a photograph. As a card carrying member of  Generation X my teen years were untouched by the internet and social media, free from the tyranny of the attention economy and unfettered by a focus on the daily curating of my image. Cameras were usually brandished by proud dads at birthdays, weddings and graduations and unposed photographs of moments of spontaneity are quite rare for those of my vintage. On a grey January morning in lockdown I got a text message from an old college friend directing me to look at a Facebook page titled Trinity College Dublin 1987-92 as she was sure that she’d seen me in a photograph. In a phobic fit of what the old image revealed I immediately indicated left and pulled into the hard shoulder and started anxiously trawling through the Facebook page as my wifi signal ebbed and flowed and pictures remained as pixallated and fuzzy as my recollection of the past. The gods of weather and wifi finally aligned and as the clouds parted my eyes alighted on the photo taken by Trevor Butterworth of four women standing on the Dining Hall steps milling into pints of ale in a Trinity Week competition in 1988.                                           I almost didn’t remember my nineteen year old self, face partially obscured by the pint glass and clad in a profusion of safari linens as she concentrated on the bacchanalaian and herculean task in hand, to consume the ale faster than the other girls. I was flanked by my partner in crime and classmate in Pharmacy, Anne Smyth who had been the agent provocateur who urged me on and up the dining room steps with her feminist bravado and gusto. There we were Anne and I ,forever young and frozen in time , the moment captured by Trevor’s lens, the negatives having languished in a drawer for a few decades, not yet fully realised, like bulbs in soil awaiting the transformative miracle of Spring. Lockdown had afforded some time for Trevor to develop the pictures and the alchemy of the darkroom revealed his photographic collection. Trinity Week was always the most fun one on campus despite being

perilously close to end of year exams and culminating on the Friday night with the iconic Trinity Ball. I can remember that particular week very  well, Anne and I were in the throes of trying to cram for exams, go to every opening of an envelope socially and plan a J1 trip to Cape Cod. Our days were spent agonising over complex pharmacological diagrams with study breaks spent running to vintage shops like Jenny Vander’s in the George’s Street , Arcade in search of frocks, frippery and faux pearls for the night of the year. The ale drinking competition proved extra problematic as a photographer had put our picture in the Irish Press and despite having given him fake names , our fifteen minutes of fame was beginning to radiate from the cobblestones of Trinity, from the sanctuary of the the Pale to our homesteads in  Dundalk and Tralee. News of our ale drinking exploits got mixed reviews from our parents but  nothing that a quick phonecall from a coinbox in Stephen’s Green couldn’t dispel and with a bit of soothing spin restore our golden girl status.

Tennessee Williams wrote that in memory, everything seems to happen to music and certainly my college memories of the late eighties are always enmeshed with the tunes of that era. I still remember the first time I hit the Buttery bar and took a few tentative steps into its dark, cavernous interior, putting my best doc clad feet forward, skittish with excitement, my face a confection of nouveau beige panstick , kohl liner and frosted plum lipstick. Word Up by Cameo was blasting from the juke box , followed by Morrisseys’ Girlfriend In A Coma, the bar was awash with a slew of young men with spiky hair who looked like they could step on stage any night and impersonate Ian McCulloch from Echo and the Bunnymen. For a teenager who had a predeliction for poetic, moody males kept lean on a diet of NME magazines and rothmans I had found my Nirvana. Sinead O Connor’s The Lion and the Cobra and Tracey Chapman’s Fast Car always transport me in a Proustian shuttle right back to 1988 when S’Express were encouraging me to “enjoy this trip, enjoy this trip, and it is a trip.” The writer Angela Carter wrote that nostalgia is the vice of the aged. It looks like I’ve just acquired another vice in middle age as I love the dopamine hit that old memories can produce, the past might be a foreign country but one I still regularly visit.