The trouble with yesterday …

I’ve always envied people who live in the present, rather than in the past. People who don’t have nostalgia hangups; who don’t go on about if only, or if I could have my time again, or those were the days …

Trouble is, I adore that song: Those were the days, my friend. Gorgeous melody, divine harmonies, irresistible lyrics.

But were those the days? Was the past really so much better than the present?

As the final, balmy days of the summer vacation draw to an end, I find my mind slipping into dangerous nostalgia-territory. Ah, the long summers of my childhood and youth – England, Poland, Austria, Cyprus … anywhere that inhabits The Past.

It doesn’t even have to be the distant past. Yesterday will do. Yes, I actually miss yesterday! It was one of those now days. My daughter knows what I mean. You say now to yourself because you want it to last forever. Nothing special happened yesterday. It was just … uneventfully lovely. 32 degrees centigrade. Blue skies. Kraków looking perfect. Reading a riveting novel on the veranda. Crickets chirping in the evening. Perfect. And now it’s gone. And I miss it.

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away …

The trouble with us nostalgia freaks who don’t fully understand the present, who are timid of the future and only speak the language of the past, is that we have a flaw in the brain’s memory control. I don’t know the proper name, but let’s call it the memoriamcerebellum.

The flaw is this: we smudge over the worst of the past, sanctify the best, and cling to it—even erroneously. For instance…

… that seemingly endless honeymoon of my first marriage. Triumph Bonneville whizzing along the coastal roads of southern England; camping under the stars; tea and scones in twee ye-old-English tea houses; that magical feeling of being ‘newly-weds’ …

Bollocks to that!

In reality, most mornings I woke up from imagined arguments with my mother, who wore black to our wedding (long story – just read Infinite Stranger); I constantly yearned for a Take Two of the day with all flaws deleted; the scones invited swarms of belligerent wasps; the rain pelted more than the sun shone (though the handful of sunny days were glorious, that’s not a lie); and when we got back home, there were only a few days left till the dread of term at the inner-city comprehensive in Stoke on Trent where I taught.

Another memory – and this one’s accurate. When I was about fifteen, my friend and I were walking home from school, and some middle-aged builders stopped to gawk at us, hands on spades.

‘Ee by gum,’ one said to his mate, ‘they didn’t make ‘em like that in our day!’

A sexist comment meant as a compliment, not frowned on then. My friend and I smothered giggles.

‘Wonder what they were like in his day?’ I whispered. The answer is simple. No different—give or take fashion. Teenagers were teenagers then, just as they are now.

But, back in the day, capital punishment was normal in the West. Death during childbirth was standard. Marriages were mostly loveless. Women were second-class citizens who couldn’t vote until after the First World War. Poverty was rife. My grandmother remembered children at school with no shoes. The occasional classmate dying from some unspeakable disease. So much for our dreams of yesterday.

But we still yearn for it – or at least some of us do – whether it’s our childhood, our youth, or some imaginary golden epoch we never even experienced, like in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

Perhaps yearning for the past is just human nature. Perhaps I’m not alone. But still, there are remarkable people who truly live today as it is; who throw away the used train tickets of the past and buy first-class ones for the future they embrace – whether tomorrow, next week, next year, their retirement …

I envy those people. They’re a different species.

Right now I’m looking out of my kitchen window at our picturesque garden, and trying to live the day. Carpe diem. I’m trying to forget the past. To embrace the future. To be courageous. Positive. Not a nerdy nostalgia addict.

Perhaps I’ll pour a chilled white wine and sit on the veranda to fully grab this moment. Perhaps I’ll skim through one of my old diaries.

No!

I’ll just grab this moment. The diaries can stay locked upstairs.

Ah, but memories … don’t they crowd you on a peaceful summer’s afternoon, when you’re sitting in your garden or balcony or a park, appreciating the late-summer breeze and soft azure sky, and remembering, remembering, remembering …?

Perhaps I need a clinic for a good dose of memoriamcerebellum therapy.

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