Is your childhood as warm and comforting a place for you as it is for me? Do you sometimes wish, really wish, that you were back there?
I'm sure plenty of us on here, particularly those in their late twenties or older, have been touched by one element or other of the industry of nostalgia. I know I certainly have. And what an industry it has become. Just one glance on Ebay at the toys and games of twenty or thirty years ago and the silly money they often sell for will clearly reveal its popularity. I sold a board game last year, an old Games Workshop affair called Talisman you may have heard of which had been gathering dust in a cupbaord. Some of the cards were damaged which I made very clear in the description - that didn't stop it selling for over £60! No surprise that the buyer, who I met to complete the deal as he was local, was a similar age to me. His mumbled excuse about the kids wanting it didn't wash! I'm not even sure why he felt the need to be embarassed. I wear my 70s/early 80s retrospection on my sleeve. Stormtroopers and Jedi are not an unfamiliar sight on my desk at work. And I don't mind getting the old photos out.
Why does my youth or childhood always seem like a better place though? Is this the same for most people - is this what drives us to buy mauled Star Wars figures, old books we remember from school and stop every time we hear a tune from those days, even though we may not even have liked it much back then. Christ I've even got an Abba CD downstairs and they are definitely not my scene - but I still listen to it.
Thing is I can't say my childhood was particularly spectacular - my sister and I were brought up by my Mum who struggled on her own till she remarried when I was about 11. We didn't have lots of things or have lots of days out and stuff like that. And yet it all seems now like one long adventure. Mostly eternal summer - action man wars with the neighbours and sneaking to my door to read books in the failing light after bed time - with the occasionally exciting winter, building igloos in the back garden, disappearing into snow drifts and Christmas stories of Peter Rabbit. Of course it wasn't all like that but that's how it seems now.
Is it just the sobering nature of responsibility that makes me want to turn the clock back? The cold truth that actually the world can be a harsh place and now love is so rarely unconditional? That there are people you could not hope to understand, that there is no Santa and maybe there is no-one who listens to your prayers? That, in the words of an early 80s song, one of those I've always loved:
The further we go
And older we grow
The more we know ...
How odd that this and more perhaps results in us reaching, like children for teddy bears, for these objects from our past.
It's kind of comforting to me now that maybe my children will look back on these years of their lives the same way I do mine. Although, at the same time, I kind of hope that they don't need to the way that I do.
