Regularly I have an impulse to cancel our Foxtel subscription. Some days go by without us turning it on and I start to wonder whether the $100+ per month we spend on it could be better used on adding to my extensive belly button lint collection. But then....

... I come across a documentary like Strummer: The Future is Unwritten and I think "holy shit, thank goodness this wasn't the week I cancelled Foxtel".

The Clash were such a big part of my young life during the early 80s. Yes, they were past their heyday at that point but I was heavily in the middle of mine. Their songs were a big part of the soundtrack of my life. How many nights did I spend in my room, living my adolescent angst through the words of songs like White Riot, Janie Jones and Straight to Hell?

Watching the story of Joe Strummer last night was amazing and scary. The weight of nostalgia literally pinned me down onto the lounge and I felt the actual heaviness of the lost years as a physical force on my body. This was the first time I had ever experienced it in this way. Before I had felt nostalgia as a lighter thing, something almost funny. Now I felt I had crossed a line. I am not young anymore; the wild, hopeful girl who loved The Clash and listened to their battlecries in the sanctuary of her middle-class suburban room is long gone, no denying it.

Worse still, so much worse, I have become someone who is repulsed by young people like I once was, afraid of them. They look like aliens to me, beamed down from another planet. That part of me is now dead and I think I only just realised that last night.

Joe Strummer is dead. And so is my youth.

Hmmm. To think that I once longed for adulthood because I thought it would mean dying my hair any shade of blue I wanted to without getting into trouble.