PAST PONDERINGS...

As I get older, I find that my thoughts often turn to certain places and points in my past the further I become removed from them.  I suspect it'll probably be the same for most of you.  When you're a teenager, you don't miss your childhood quite so much (if at all) because it doesn't seem that long ago, and because you're busy enjoying the things that come with being a teenager.  (Girls, Melvin.  And smoking and drinking - not that I ever imbibed in the latter two - or enough of the former come to that.)  When you're a young adult, your teenage years still seem fairly recent, so you don't miss them so much either.  But that doesn't quite nail down what I'm trying to convey.

When I first moved into my present house in 1972, unusually for me, I didn't really miss my previous house in the same way that I had missed the ones which preceded it.  That's because I still went to school (for another two and a half years) just across the road from my old house, and because I still hung around the area as that's where my friends lived.  I'd moved to another house in another neighbourhood, but because my 'old' neighbourhood was still very much part of my day-to-day experience, there was no reason for me to miss it as I frequented the area a very large part of the time, both during and after school hours.  I passed my old house often, or had it within view, without ever feeling disconnected from it.

In fact, it wasn't until I moved to yet another house eleven years later, that I began to miss the house I hadn't hitherto missed until that point.  (Readers may well be thinking at this stage:  "Wait a minute, didn't you just say you moved into your present home in 1972?"  Yes, but after moving out in 1983, we moved back again in '87.)  In fact, the 'interim' house, the one in which my family lived between '83 and '87, wasn't one I had ever wanted to move to, so when we vacated it after four years, I did so without a second thought.  Strangely though, about 18 to 20 years afterwards, I started to have fond memories of my time there, and today miss that house as much as any of the others I've lived in.

I've been back inside every house I remember ever having lived in, years after the fact, and it's almost like time travel for me.  As I said in another post once, whenever I've revisited a place, it's almost like I just popped out to the shops for ten minutes and then came straight back, the years spent elsewhere seeming almost like a dimly remembered dream.  There's only one residence I've never been back inside of, and that's my first abode in Glasgow, where I lived for the first one and a half years of my life.  I've stood on the landing outside the front door and had my photo taken (and also snapped photos of the outside of the tenement building), but as I have no conscious memory of ever having lived there, the 'time travel' effect wouldn't occur anyway.  (The flat has been empty for a few years, hence my inability to gain access.  One day soon hopefully.)  

So what's the point of this meandering post you may be wondering.  I'm interested to hear if there are times or events in your life that are long-gone, and which you never really thought about - or missed - until many years after the fact, and which now feel painful - unbearable even - to be 'parted' from?  Search the recesses of your memory banks and share with your fellow Criv-ites some magical moments from your past that you wish were still present.  Quick - before the memory fades forever.   

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