Postcards From My Kitchen Table

nostalgia – a sentimental longing for or wistful affection for a period in the past

Over the last few days I’ve been listening to a lot of Radiohead in anticipation of their headlining performance on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury tonight. Not ‘Kid A’ or ‘In Rainbows’ era Radiohead but 90s ‘Pablo Honey’, ‘The Bends’ and ‘OK Computer’ Radiohead. As I type I have half an eye on Youtube and their 1997 Pyramid Stage outing and I feel consumed with a swirling sense of nostalgia. I can almost smell my tiny room in my now demolished Hall of Residence in St Andrews, or my friend Ian’s room where we used to sit and listen to ‘The Bends’ endlessly while smoking packets of Marlboro Lights and other less legal substances. The future seemed so bright, our freedom appeared endless and full of infinite possibility.

As I listen to ‘Exit Music (For a Film) I can remember so clearly coming wide eyed from the cinema having watched Baz Luhrmann’s extraordinary and exhilarating ‘Romeo & Juliet’. Studying for an degree in English Literature and already a slightly geeky admirer of Shakespeare, his work now held a serious cool factor. Hearing that famous prose up there on the big screen in almighty technicolour made me feel almost euphoric.

Just a few weeks ago I heard Fat Boy Slim on the radio – he’s been relegated to Radio 2 these days – and my mind instantly travelled back to that scorching day in July 2002 when I and a group of friends together with an unprecedented 250,000 others descended on Brighton for the Big Beach Boutique II – a free beach party headlined by none other than Mr Norman Cook himself.

Looking back I’m sure it was the sheer amount of alcohol in my system that saved me from getting seriously hurt that night. I didn’t resist being pulled through the terrifyingly huge crowds, past the riot police as people fell onto train tracks and off walls. I couldn’t understand why my mum sounded so anxious when she telephoned me the following morning to check I was ok. I hadn’t seen the headlines. I hadn’t realised how dangerously close the event had come to tragedy. How thousands of people had been forced to sleep on the beach, unable to exit the seaside town. How Norman Cook had to personally foot the bill for the £300,000 three day beach clean up. Would I have wanted my children to have been at such a event? You bet I wouldn’t. Did I have blast – you bet I did.

I’ve recently finished reading ‘Now we are 40 – Whatever Happened to Generation X’ by Tiffanie Darke, one-time editor of The Sunday Times Style Magazine.  Once again it made me yearn for a world now long gone. A world before technology turned us all into droids. A world where we made firm plans, when we actually talked to our friends face to face, when we wrote letters with pen and paper, when we drank gin before it was cool and when Marlboro Lights existed.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve recently turned 40, or that my eldest son is about to start school and therefore my role of ‘Stay at Home mum’ is facing redundancy and forcing me to think about what comes next for me. Whatever the cause, there is no doubt that nostalgia has been creeping around the edges of my busy mind a lot lately, often triggered by music.

When researching for this post I was struck by a quote from actor Cecil Baldwin,

‘Here is the truth of nostalgia; we don’t feel it for who we were, but who we weren’t. We feel it for all the possibilities that were open to us but that we didn’t take’ 

If Baldwin is correct perhaps it is my eldest’s imminent departure through the school gates that is sparking these trips down memory lane. As I emerge from a five year fog of intense mothering and begin to see a life for myself again, I’m remembering all the possibilities the world once had just for me. I certainly grasped as many opportunities as I could but I then chose to put them on hold to be a mother. That was perhaps the most gut wrenching decision I’ve ever made but ultimately the right one for me.

There have been many times during the last five years when I’ve felt future opportunities were lost to me but now I like to believe they are most definitely still there. As I looked out at the world in 1997 when Radiohead performed their legendary set on the Pyramid Stage and the world was my oyster, perhaps it is once again. Perhaps I now stand at a gateway to my future.

The recent terror attack in Manchester brought the Oasis anthem ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ back into our national consciousness. When I saw the famous lyrics projected onto a giant screen at the recent ‘One Love Manchester’ concert, I suddenly realised how old I was – words that were part of my subconscious were completely alien to huge swaths of the audience. There was something hugely moving about seeing thousands of people of all ages coming together to sing this iconic 90s song – whether they were hearing it for the first time or the 1000th. While I sang along full of memories of times gone by hoards of young people, their lives full of infinite possibility, were creating new ones.

Nostalgia and memory are intrinsically linked and when it comes down to it, we are just shells made up of memories.  All of us are shaped by our experiences both past, present and future. So whilst there is something comforting and special about indulging in warm, fuzzy nostalgia it’s important not to forget the big world that’s out there right now. One in which we can all make new and wondrous memories, one which is full of infinite possibilities no matter how old we might be. We just need to seize them.