Nostalgia anybody?

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Any other nostalgia freaks out there?
By its very nature my question is aimed generally at older members.

I absolutely love visiting my old childhood haunts. I can almost see the ghosts of myself and my friends still playing there. My local ASDA is sited on the exact spot where an old, abandoned farmhouse and pigsty used to be. As a young boy I used to hang around there with my air rifle every weekend rain or shine. Every time I visit the store now I still see the pile of bricks in my mind and the empty fields that surrounded the area; now all built upon. The only thing that’s left is a small wood and what used to be the farm duck pond.
I visit dried up ponds that I used to fish as a child. I hang around a set of rotting canal lock gates (the canal long ago filled in) where I once camped overnight to fish. I can remember to the exact inch where we pitched the tent. Only yesterday I visited an old deserted stretch of road that we used to fly down at 100mph on our motorbikes. It’s now a pothole strewn mess. I visit my old senior school site (now an industrial estate) and stand on the playground.


I believe that I remember more than most and that’s why I think of the past whilst most just move on. I often try to reminisce with my older (none AS) brother but he remembers absolutely nothing of our antics all those years ago.

I love things that I remember from my childhood but that you hardy ever see nowdays. Some of those things are routemaster buses, old underground trains and those tomato ketchup holders in the shape of a big plastic tomato that all the wimpy bars and a lot of cafes used to have. I've bought myself one of those. I went to a vintage event just a few days ago and was tempted to go back and buy some ridgeway 'homemaker' plates that were on sale there. I didn't, but I might still try and get some on ebay at some time. We had a set of those, I grew up with it and I believe it is still in the famly; my sister 'inherited' it. I really like when I see something familiar from my childhood that I haven't seen for years and had forgotten about, and the feelings of nostalgia that evokes.
I would love to be able to revisit the streets around where I grew up and see them exactly as they were in my childhood with all the old shops and houses and everything as it was before all the new places were built. I like finding and seek out old fashioned workmen's type cafes, there aren't many of those left now, and old fashioned shops and train stations with old fashioned (original) features. I love places that have remained unchanged by time.

Yes. I think I live in the past a lot. The future is impossible to see, and the present isn't so great. So I think about the past.

I seem to spend time in my mind in several stages of my life. In my primary school years, in my university years, and my late 20's.

I think my memory for my childhood in particular is quite good, although not for my teenage years so much. And my memory for the events of the last 8 or so years is quite poor.

So I suppose it is nostalgia, although it's not always fond memories that I have. I think I also have nostalgia for times when I haven't lived, like a past when people were closer to the land and nature's cycles, and there were communities that supported each other. Today's world can make little sense to me. It's materialistic, selfish, shallow, and quite bleak.

My nostalgia "madness" extends to people too.
I'm forever bumping into old friends from my badminton days who I remember very well.
They never remember anything when I bring details up from the past.
I'm sure that when I walk off and leave them they think to themselves "who on earth was that"?
The problem is that to me they are still the fun loving twenty something that I shared a game and a laugh and a beer with whereas their recollection of badminton nights (and me) has almost completly faded.

I have always had overwhelming nostalgia for the past. I have longed to be a tiny baby again for as long as I can remember (and I can remember a long way back, my third birthday is my first dated memory but I have memories from an ambiguous time before then). I long for the return of old objects, my old bedroom, my grandparents' house, safety and security, hours spent doing nothing and being carefree...

I am a nostalgia freak. I lived in a dreamlike state as a kid, and the closest I can describe it is similar to being extremely stoned to the point where colours and shapes are encompassing, your senses are heightened and your imagination goes insane. You can see everything as interesting and as a chance to pretend you are somewhere or someone else. It is the most euphoric feeling in the entire universe, and so I try to tap into nostalgia when I can to trigger it.

There are certian commercials, tv shows, songs and videos that trigger these feelings and even just exploring some of them takes me back instantly to certian times and places.

Oh god! reading this thread I realise how obsessively nostalgic I really am.

I struggle to remember where I left my car keys or my daughter's toys. Despite this I have a photographic memory of my primary school and highschool. I remember every person I went to school with, their specific personalities and even conversations I had with them.

I have a vivid memory of the catholic school I went to even the colour of the weatherboard and I can still feel the dry paint on the wood and how I used to stare at the lizards poking their little heads from under the gaps in the boards. I recall all the trees in school yard, cimbing on the roof and crawling under the school with a torch for fun! I remember even the architecture of the basement, student theatre, chapel, OMG, dance hall, art room, the road where I used ot get picked up...OMG it's like I used up all my brain space and filled it with my school years....buildings, people, teachers, colours, trees, animals, food books I read, classes....etc etc...

For me it's Swinging London, Routemasters, black cabs, Carnaby Street, vintage unisex fashions, pea coats, The Kinks, Twiggy and the music of The British Invasion. Okay everybody, you can all call me a Mod at the same time.

Sometimes, but not really. Perhaps it's just the way I operate - I tend to focus forward, not backwards. I wouldn't say I'm a particularly driven person, but more like I feel like the past is something that is abstract and finished.

Although, I do enjoy looking at vintage guitars. I had a ball when I visited EMP in Seattle, and they had a great collection of vintage guitars. I have a vintage guitar myself - a 1966 Fender Mustang, with original tweed case. Red finish, all-original parts and guts, fun to play, gorgeous guitar. I'm happy to take it out, plug it in and shake the windows. I'm not the type to buy a vintage guitar and place it behind a glass case - I think that is a general waste of a guitar, unless you're doing that in order to put them in an exhibit.

Anyways, I digress a bit. I dig the sounds of the 60s and 70s too. The most exciting era of music, really. Nothing else, aside from the 90s grunge scene, has touched on the amount of innovation of that era.

Oh, you don't know how much I can relate to all of you... Except that I don't have as good memory as some of you. Well directed triggers can bring up a vast amount of old memories in my mind, though.

I have the fortunate position to visit the scenes of my childhood almost on weekly basis, as my parents still live in the same apartment in which I was brought up decades ago. I'm glad to see that essentially it's unchanged, my nursery school, preschool, primary school, secondary school (highschool), and even the music school in which I learned to play trombone for 4 years, all are in their old places, still functioning as it was only yesterday we parted... Of course there were changes to them, the buildings, the shops, the streets, passages, trees, bushes have changed, and one of my regular habits to conjure their sight and details as they were many many years ago.

In addition I like to listen to old music sometimes that I used to play somewhere in the past, and I'm happy to see old carpets, textiles, wall-carpets etc. from my childhood too, the mere sight of them is so comforting.... In my smaller room I still have the same carpet that my feet had tapped as a toddler...

Somehow I'm not surprised, I was wondering why I'm so nostalgic only before I discovered AS.

I am very nostalgic and enjoy being where I have been before, even if the memories of those places themselves are bad (then again, the bad memories are usually linked to people, not places). I have a very good memory for things like that and there are a number of things which can really set me off based on that.

I am happy to have lived in the same place for basically my entire life, and to have very few family members move as well.

I like going back to places I visited as a child.

Also visiting historical sites and imagine what it would be like to have been there in the year 1500.

Can be mesmerized hearing old game tunes again.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a7Sh82Mzdc&feature=related[/youtube]

All my favorite places from childhood have been "updated" or "renovated" or simply torn down for parking lots. The places that hold my most cherished childhood memories are gone. I do not get nostalgia from visiting my old school bulding. I get short of breath and start hyper ventalating just from driving past it. There is only one spot that holds cherished childhood memories left but that might be demolished soon too.