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.
I was bullied at school: not horrifically (and I was a sarcastically caustic little fiend, so I probably deserved at least some of it) but I’m even nostalgic about THAT stuff. I actually walked past my old workplace at Blockbuster Video on King Street and felt a tear welling up when I fondly remembered the time a guy had tried to ram my head through the glass after I gently suggested he couldn’t look around the store in his underpants.
These days, I cannot walk along Salisbury Avenue in Broadstairs without being back on my BMX, racing to my best mate’s massive converted bungalow to hang out in the summerhouse that seemed so huge at the time but now just looks like a tiny shed. At the time, I was really jealous: I came from a one-parent family, and my mum worked three jobs just so that we could eat, whereas my mate’s family seemed like millionaires in comparison.
You kinda miss who you were before life got complicated and stressful. For me, worries about food and girls and games now seem hilariously unimportant against the big stuff: whether your kids will enjoy healthy and happy lives, whether the business will ever bring in more than the minimum wage and what sort of life retirement you’ll have if you ever manage to pay off the kitchen, the mortgage or even just the sofa.
A friend said to me recently that you don’t really know what worry is until your first child is born and I have to say amen to that. It’s like having your heart walking around on its own outside your body.
So…nostalgia can do one.
I often wonder if it’s different when you move from the town you grew up in. What if I DIDN’T walk past the house I lived in for twenty years? What if I didn’t run alongside the same rocks I’d climbed with the gang when we used to hang out at the monument? What’s happened to all those guys and girls? Where are they now?
I tell myself it’s living here that’s the problem: all the old memories buzzing around you like flies. Then I call my mate who left Thanet for the depths of rural Ireland, and he goes “Oh my god - you remember the time we were on Thanet Road and that dude ran out of his house dressed as a chicken? There’s a guy just LIKE that here in Pant y Wacco.
It’s like L.P. Hartley's quote that the late, great Terry Pratchett used to distort a bit: “The past is another country: they do things differently there.”
