What I am facing - will it shape my future?

This is the view that is directly above my computer screen, which I therefore look at many hundreds of times in every week:

• The postcard featuring the queen was given to me upon the occasion of my birthday by Kaye Yip a couple of years ago. I recently added the oriental moustache in a moment of ennui.


• The mulleted footballer was part of some internal hate mail sent to me when I had long hair myself. A friend of a friend (who I did not know very well) enclosed it along with a note saying that my hair 'looked shit'.


• The photograph is of Kate and me on stage in the function room of the Savoy Hotel during a works do. For some reason I had been bigged up in my department as a huge fan of Chesney Hawkes and so when 'The One and Only' came on the sound system I was obliged to go up front and sing along to it.

This Urban Abstract is essentially an enquiry into whether what we become accustomed to / exposed to over a period of time will shape how we develop in the future - and what the consequences of that can be.

For instance - will I be more likely to veer towards monarchism, keeping short hair, and being nostalgic about Chesney Hawkes now that these images have been impressed upon me so many times? For the record, I think the answer may well be yes, although I am not an impartial observer in this case.

Furthermore, if the answer is yes, just think how so many apparently random paths are interwoven throughout time, which combine and influence our future behaviour (which in turn goes on to influence more events, and so on)!

In a roundabout way, I think I have just convinced myself that I am a proponent of determinism! See here for further details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism