At about 10 this morning I was driving through Slough, the town I lived in for 10 years of my late childhood/adolescence. I stopped at a traffic light and had the leisure to admire the row of shops I used to visit as a small child when I stayed the night at my grandmother's flat. The cafe is still a cafe, the travel agent and the engineering office are gone, as is the newsagents (valuable source of sweets and comics), there's still a corner grocery - it used to be a "Mace" - the fish and chip shop had morphed into a Kebab Palace twice the size... and the old Salt Hill Hotel is now ugly flats.
As I sat there reminiscing, the CD in the car piped up with the Detroit Spinners' song Could it be I'm Falling in Love (witcha' Baby?) a song from early 1973, when I was 15-16 and in love and in Slough and it was as if every twitch of nostalgia I was feeling gathered itself together rolling everything into a ball and hurling itself at me so that I found myself thinking about the darn LO again. I am not here for that, I am here to help my father with his tax affairs. But the fact is that I have spent so little time here in my adult life, that the place becomes associated almost exclusively with one's early intense experiences of it - it has no afterlife for me - they've demolished half the buildings that were put up in the 1970s - it's a different place now.
I don't feel nostalgia for Slough - but it has the capacity to painfully force me to recall moments of extreme happiness, optimism, the youthful sense of the wide world ahead, fanning out like the headlights on a car, illuminating all the dreams and possibilities. Ironic that a place I have always found rather dreary should do that. On the other hand - the most recent experience I have had here was my mother's funeral - so I also have flashes of memory about that day/period.
As I sat there reminiscing, the CD in the car piped up with the Detroit Spinners' song Could it be I'm Falling in Love (witcha' Baby?) a song from early 1973, when I was 15-16 and in love and in Slough and it was as if every twitch of nostalgia I was feeling gathered itself together rolling everything into a ball and hurling itself at me so that I found myself thinking about the darn LO again. I am not here for that, I am here to help my father with his tax affairs. But the fact is that I have spent so little time here in my adult life, that the place becomes associated almost exclusively with one's early intense experiences of it - it has no afterlife for me - they've demolished half the buildings that were put up in the 1970s - it's a different place now.
I don't feel nostalgia for Slough - but it has the capacity to painfully force me to recall moments of extreme happiness, optimism, the youthful sense of the wide world ahead, fanning out like the headlights on a car, illuminating all the dreams and possibilities. Ironic that a place I have always found rather dreary should do that. On the other hand - the most recent experience I have had here was my mother's funeral - so I also have flashes of memory about that day/period.
No comments:
Post a Comment