Growing Up in Ramsgate: What Nostalgia Is Really About
There are so many places in Ramsgate that trigger memories for me: some good, some bad…mostly somewhere in between.
Nostalgia is really odd, when you think about it. You’re often fondly remembering events and situations you didn’t even know you were enjoying at the time. Of course, you’re not missing the event itself (growing up was tough, even in the 80s) or the situations or the place or even the people. You’re missing who you were then and how it felt to be you. You’re missing a time when your worries amounted to what you were having for dinner, who you fancied and who you’d be sitting next to on the bus to school; maybe whether the game you wanted so badly would be in Woolworths on Saturday morning or whether you’d need to trek over to Margate to get it.
A Game of Pubs
Reflecting on the big news this week that pubs are allowed to stay open longer for the football, I found myself thinking about how much has changed in terms of exactly what pubs meant to so many people during my childhood and exactly what they mean now.
First off, it’s worth pointing out that, beyond the semi-regular trip to Spoons in Ramsgate for breakfast and the occasional weekend dash out to country pubs with my wife for the odd glass of red, I am not a pub drinker. This is probably because I spent so much of my childhood in pubs and around pub culture.