The Death of Nostalgia

What is nostalgia?

I like to think of this as fond memories of the past. Where for some people their recollections of some past events are not wholesome, then this is not what nostalgia is about.

However once nostalgia's warm beginnings wain, then the once started train may lead not where one originally envisioned.

Such are my adolescent recollections.

I suspect that many peoples school day memories evoke mixed emotions. These were a hotchpotch mixture of good and sad experiences, perhaps regretfully some of our own deeds best forgotten, yet, yet again dredged up among the collection of minds net.

But our experiences and memories thereof are what make us what we are today, for better or worse. We cannot escape our past, it is always there to remind us.

Regarding myself, two phases stick out as prominent among the reefs negotiated by my younger self on his was to maturity.

One is the combined infant/junior school from age 5 to age 10. I have many fond, and some not so fond, memories of my experiences during my stay there.

But whatever the value to these memories, they are torn from the page because that building was burning down in 2008, and replaced by a modern anonymous impersonal flat roof construction.

For example, resisting the compulsory afternoon nap because I was just not tired, climbing the ropes in the infants gym, in the juniors learning to slide on two feet down an icy slope in the winter. If you think about it for an eight year old this was a formative experience, for the first time voluntarily putting yourself in jeopardy for the thrill of sliding at high speed.

Why was the school burned down? Curiously there was spate of school burnings in the Rhondda dating from the mid 1970s. initially it was claimed this was due to disgruntled pupils, and that in subsequent years in became a fashion or trend with the youth. Another idea is that over three decades the aging Victorian schools were just accidents waiting to happen. Just here's a conjecture, those aging fire hazard schools could not have been replaced until they had been involuntarily demolished, even though many in authority perceived the nee to replace them.

I attended my old Porth Grammar Technical School from age eleven to age nineteen, I entered full of trepidation and awe, nervous of the hundreds of years of tradition into which I was suddenly initiated. I left world wise, head high looking around for what the world had to offer. I had many happy and tragic times during these formative years. In any case many memories. Sadly those memories are now a housing estate. The old grammar school was pulled down, and with it many memories that still play in my dreams to this day, happy, sad, and somewhere in between.

This is my school photo from 1977, in all my time the only school photo ever made. I was in the lower sixth form at the time, so none of my comrades' from forms one to five are captured, their memories fade, no school photo was made during that time. I'm easy to spot, I'm the one looking slightly our of place, as though I descended from Mars the day before and still don't know quite what to make of the World. This is just far left picture of four pictures in total.

Nostalgia is a thing we cherish in memory, even though it may not be historically accurate, and may be a past we can never revisit, even if we could go back physically to those places concerned.

Happy memories. D