I read an interview with Bill Drummond the other day, in which he talks about nostalgia. He describes it as a sickness to be cut out because it tells us lies about things being once better than they are now. Forget the past; think about today. As someone who spends a lot of time writing about the past and trying to make sense of it, I’m not sure how much I agree. I certainly can romanticise it, but not because I see it as better than the present, but largely because I view it as infinitely worse. Oh, the terrible times I lived through!
There are many things I don’t want to remember. The past tugs on my arm, demanding to be recognised. I turn the other way. “Oh no, we’ve never met before”. I shrug it off. How many of us do this – hiding in the present, scared of who we once were? The past would haunt us if we let it. But we won’t. We cut out nostalgia, and with it, remembering.
I think that’s why places from my past fascinate me, and why I can’t ever quite leave them alone. Because no matter how much I may think my life has changed, there’s always a little bit of myself I leave behind, like a photo, tucked inside some old jeans pocket. I never quite know when I’m going to accidentally pull it out, and feel surprised.
The other day I posted pictures on Facebook of my recent trip up North to Yorkshire and Snowdonia. They reflected back the dark, brooding mists of my homeland, those places I love so much. I can so easily romanticise the North from my flat in young, happening Brighton, with its candy-rock Palace Pier, it's everlasting stream of clear sky. I forget the days when I couldn’t wait to get the hell away from there.
Though I studied in Manchester for five years, it’s not fun college times I largely remember. It's days spent wandering the collapsed city centre immediately following the IRA bomb explosion in 1996. Ooh, what a laugh I am. As someone standing right near where it went off, it would have killed me and probably a thousand others had the IRA not issued a warning and the police been so quick to react. I’d stare at the blackened hole, leaning into the mesh that separated me from it, wishing I could wriggle underneath and walk unfettered through the dark heart of Manchester, through the ripped out concrete shells I’d once shopped in. Royal Exchange, Corn Exchange, Arndale Centre – all Manchester landmarks and great seats of consumerism, reduced to rubble. Just as vulnerable and fragile as me. In a strange way, it made me want to laugh.
I was upset when they began to rebuild it. I wanted something of that charred, empty space to remain, to remind everyone of the terrible thing that had happened. Now, I hardly recognise Manchester anymore. The shops are bigger and better and the Corn Exchange where I used to work - a crappy flea market filled with dodgy watch-dealers and astrologers - is now a Harvey Nichols. People don’t want to walk past a reminder of a city’s grief. They want the future. They want tomorrow.
Who can blame them? The last time I was in Manchester, I looked up at the sign on the wall of The Hacienda Apartments and thought ‘I could be sad about this, but the irony is too great.’ Perhaps those who, twenty years ago waved their arms up and down on The Hacienda stage off their nuts, were the same people who now drove their BMWs into the electronically controlled Private Parking spaces under the building and, kicking off their shoes, looked out over Whitworth Street and smiled.
Is this nostalgia? Wondering what I’d have done without that nightclub, the drugs and the dungarees, the Frankie Knuckles mixtapes and the dream Ecstasy gives you at that age? Standing on the corner of my road, aged fifteen, with my sister and some lads from Blacon who made acid house music on computers, shouting “In the beginning, there was House!” at old ladies in Mini Metros. Done my homework? Actually listened in Geography class?
Dashing in from school every Friday, I’d throw off my uniform, pull on my Kickers and wait for the car that would drive my sister and I up the M56, past Helsby Hill, past Runcorn chemical plant into Manchester. As we drove into the city centre, I’d catch sight of the queue that snaked half a mile down the street, my fake ID trembling in my hand. The doors would open and that familiar thud of bass-line and dry ice would hit me. I'd sip my coke, a pill sliding down my throat. Then half an hour later I’d push my way into the thick of it; sweat, bodies, faces, smiling, a crazy rush of communion, screaming up at the DJ box, “come on!” chanting like a tribe to its leader. I was home.
Bittersweet times. Isn't that youth at it's best? At its height, I fell in love with a boy in a pink NafNaf sweatshirt, who had black hair that curled over his ears and a dog called Blackie who bit my ankle. Pretty soon, I’d left the Blacon boys to their drum machines and started instead driving to Manchester with my new dark-haired boyfriend and his mate. We’d tear up the highway in his friend’s Rhosddhu Carpets van.
One morning, after a night at the Hacienda, my new boyfriend and I wound our way through grey tenement blocks and chip papers, to where the thudding bass continued all through the night. Hulme was beautiful to me then. We pushed open the door of a squatted flat, filthy with three-week old leftovers, swarming with flies in the July heat, trying not to touch anything. Then he and I lay down on a dirty mattress and held each other and looked into each other’s eyes, sunshine already breaking through the torn sheet across the window. It was the first time I’d been touched where my desire felt like something real, not something expected. I almost lost my virginity that morning, but we stopped last minute because we didn’t have any protection. I didn’t want to end up some girl pushing a pram at fifteen. I wanted to write, be in a band; get a degree. So I cried out, his hand between my thighs “Not now! I don't want to end up like bloody Michelle Fowler off Eastenders!”
On the way back from Snowdonia last week, we drove by the village where I grew up, so I decided to pop in on my sister. A familiar feeling of love and panic hit me. Beforehand, we drove to the cemetery where Mum is buried. However, when I arrived, there was no marking post, nothing to tell me where she was. Poor Mum. I rang Flintshire County Council and wandered through the graveyard clutching my mobile until they eventually found me her plot number. I sat down, feeling angry and sad. “Sorry Mum”, I said.
The last time I went to her grave, I lay down on the grass beside her, just as I’d lain the last time I saw her alive, struggling for air through a face mask in Wrexham hospital. I’d talked and cried, rubbing my fingers in the newly turned soil. But this time, my words evaporated in the silence, until, cold and hungry, I eventually got up and left.
There are many things I don’t want to remember. The past tugs on my arm, demanding to be recognised. I turn the other way. “Oh no, we’ve never met before”. I shrug it off. How many of us do this – hiding in the present, scared of who we once were? The past would haunt us if we let it. But we won’t. We cut out nostalgia, and with it, remembering.
I think that’s why places from my past fascinate me, and why I can’t ever quite leave them alone. Because no matter how much I may think my life has changed, there’s always a little bit of myself I leave behind, like a photo, tucked inside some old jeans pocket. I never quite know when I’m going to accidentally pull it out, and feel surprised.
The other day I posted pictures on Facebook of my recent trip up North to Yorkshire and Snowdonia. They reflected back the dark, brooding mists of my homeland, those places I love so much. I can so easily romanticise the North from my flat in young, happening Brighton, with its candy-rock Palace Pier, it's everlasting stream of clear sky. I forget the days when I couldn’t wait to get the hell away from there.
Though I studied in Manchester for five years, it’s not fun college times I largely remember. It's days spent wandering the collapsed city centre immediately following the IRA bomb explosion in 1996. Ooh, what a laugh I am. As someone standing right near where it went off, it would have killed me and probably a thousand others had the IRA not issued a warning and the police been so quick to react. I’d stare at the blackened hole, leaning into the mesh that separated me from it, wishing I could wriggle underneath and walk unfettered through the dark heart of Manchester, through the ripped out concrete shells I’d once shopped in. Royal Exchange, Corn Exchange, Arndale Centre – all Manchester landmarks and great seats of consumerism, reduced to rubble. Just as vulnerable and fragile as me. In a strange way, it made me want to laugh.
I was upset when they began to rebuild it. I wanted something of that charred, empty space to remain, to remind everyone of the terrible thing that had happened. Now, I hardly recognise Manchester anymore. The shops are bigger and better and the Corn Exchange where I used to work - a crappy flea market filled with dodgy watch-dealers and astrologers - is now a Harvey Nichols. People don’t want to walk past a reminder of a city’s grief. They want the future. They want tomorrow.
Who can blame them? The last time I was in Manchester, I looked up at the sign on the wall of The Hacienda Apartments and thought ‘I could be sad about this, but the irony is too great.’ Perhaps those who, twenty years ago waved their arms up and down on The Hacienda stage off their nuts, were the same people who now drove their BMWs into the electronically controlled Private Parking spaces under the building and, kicking off their shoes, looked out over Whitworth Street and smiled.
Is this nostalgia? Wondering what I’d have done without that nightclub, the drugs and the dungarees, the Frankie Knuckles mixtapes and the dream Ecstasy gives you at that age? Standing on the corner of my road, aged fifteen, with my sister and some lads from Blacon who made acid house music on computers, shouting “In the beginning, there was House!” at old ladies in Mini Metros. Done my homework? Actually listened in Geography class?
Dashing in from school every Friday, I’d throw off my uniform, pull on my Kickers and wait for the car that would drive my sister and I up the M56, past Helsby Hill, past Runcorn chemical plant into Manchester. As we drove into the city centre, I’d catch sight of the queue that snaked half a mile down the street, my fake ID trembling in my hand. The doors would open and that familiar thud of bass-line and dry ice would hit me. I'd sip my coke, a pill sliding down my throat. Then half an hour later I’d push my way into the thick of it; sweat, bodies, faces, smiling, a crazy rush of communion, screaming up at the DJ box, “come on!” chanting like a tribe to its leader. I was home.
Bittersweet times. Isn't that youth at it's best? At its height, I fell in love with a boy in a pink NafNaf sweatshirt, who had black hair that curled over his ears and a dog called Blackie who bit my ankle. Pretty soon, I’d left the Blacon boys to their drum machines and started instead driving to Manchester with my new dark-haired boyfriend and his mate. We’d tear up the highway in his friend’s Rhosddhu Carpets van.
One morning, after a night at the Hacienda, my new boyfriend and I wound our way through grey tenement blocks and chip papers, to where the thudding bass continued all through the night. Hulme was beautiful to me then. We pushed open the door of a squatted flat, filthy with three-week old leftovers, swarming with flies in the July heat, trying not to touch anything. Then he and I lay down on a dirty mattress and held each other and looked into each other’s eyes, sunshine already breaking through the torn sheet across the window. It was the first time I’d been touched where my desire felt like something real, not something expected. I almost lost my virginity that morning, but we stopped last minute because we didn’t have any protection. I didn’t want to end up some girl pushing a pram at fifteen. I wanted to write, be in a band; get a degree. So I cried out, his hand between my thighs “Not now! I don't want to end up like bloody Michelle Fowler off Eastenders!”
On the way back from Snowdonia last week, we drove by the village where I grew up, so I decided to pop in on my sister. A familiar feeling of love and panic hit me. Beforehand, we drove to the cemetery where Mum is buried. However, when I arrived, there was no marking post, nothing to tell me where she was. Poor Mum. I rang Flintshire County Council and wandered through the graveyard clutching my mobile until they eventually found me her plot number. I sat down, feeling angry and sad. “Sorry Mum”, I said.
The last time I went to her grave, I lay down on the grass beside her, just as I’d lain the last time I saw her alive, struggling for air through a face mask in Wrexham hospital. I’d talked and cried, rubbing my fingers in the newly turned soil. But this time, my words evaporated in the silence, until, cold and hungry, I eventually got up and left.
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