On This Day In 1999

Looking Back

On this day in 1999 I sent out the fourth of my Cool Thing Of The Day To Do In Aberystwyth e-mails. I wasn’t blogging at the time (although I did have a blog previously), but I felt that it would be nice to do something to help keep in touch with my friends and family “back home”, so I came up with Cool Thing Of The Day To Do In Aberystwyth. Every day I’d send back a bulk e-mail about something that I’d gotten up to during my first months at the University. Some of them were pretty tame, but some were more spectacular, like the time some of my hallmates and I tried to steal a golf course, piece by piece. Many of them just appear dated, like the one where I balk at having over 3.25GB of digital music. I was having a great time, and I wanted to share it with my friends, even when my college-mate Richard wrote to say that he didn’t believe me.

When I finally got around to re-integrating my old blog entries (well, the ones I could recover) from the last millennium into my new blog, I also decided to include the Cool Thing Of The Day, with a few minor amendments.

The dates on many of them aren’t actually accurate, because when I re-imported them I made the assumption that I sent one every day, which wasn’t the case (it was actually one every two or three days, and they went on into 2000, which isn’t correctly reflected any longer). However, the date for this particular one is pretty close. On this day in 1999, I bought tickets to see Craig Charles during his Live On Earth tour, at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

Looking Forward

When we actually went to see Craig Charles, it was after a couple of heavy nights partying all around the UK, to celebrate the birthdays of my friends Andy and Reb (Reb would later go on to become my girlfriend, although we had a friends-with-benefits arrangement going on for a long while before then). We started the party in a few London pubs and a club, and then Andy and my friend Gary sobered up as fast as they could to drive back to Aberystwyth, arriving just before the sunrise, while Reb and I took the train behind them.

Cool Thing Of The Day died in January, after I became bored of it and was finding it harder and harder to do new and cool things that would justify keeping it on. Many of my friendships with the people who received the newsletter waned, but I still keep in touch with most of the recipients of it, albeit only occasionally.

Craig Charles was pretty good. I bumped into him afterwards in the Glengower Hotel bar where he apparently later got into a fight with a local.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.