Notes on nostalgia

When you want to time-hop back to your old self...

I used to smell of cinnamon and tequila. Depending on the time of day, one scent would overpower the other, and glitter was permanently encrusted under my nails, it spread across my fingertips. Everything I touched did, actually, turn to gold. 

This was twenty years ago, when, for just a few months, I worked in Jenners Department Store in Edinburgh, in their Christmas shop. I was 17-years-old, saving up for my “gap year” but a lot of that money went behind the bar across the road, rather than into my savings account. I could cure a hangover with an Irn Bru and a tattie scone, and I was frequently told off for not obeying uniform rules. I was happy, hopeful and just a little bit silly. 

Now if you’re not familiar with Jenners, I capitalised it as Jenners Department Store for a reason: its significance deserves respect. It’s the Harrods of Scotland. It’s luxury, it’s glamour, it’s history, it’s… gone. 

The store had its doors boarded up in May 2020, but lately I’ve developed this yearning for the building. I want to wander into the beauty hall, spritz myself with perfume. I want to stroke the wooden panelling of the bannisters, feel the close gilded luxury of the ancient lifts. I want to go up to the floor where I once existed, see the room that was bedecked in tinsel, hundreds of baubles and disco-esque fairy lights.

I want to visit who I once was. 

I’ve just returned from a visit to Edinburgh, during August’s wasp-and-tourist ridden Fringe festival. It was a three-day trip in which I enforced my desire for nostalgia on my friends. My schedule consisted of all the things I used to do, with a particular focus on one over-romanticised summer that took place after graduation. A month where I stayed up til 6am most nights trying (and failing) to make comedians laugh, sneaking into various venues, using the tried-and-tested trick of asking people to transfer their entry stamps onto my own wrist, dampening the ink with their spit. I wore nighties as dresses and shared a wardrobe with two friends, who had moved into my house for the summer. We listened to Paolo Nutini and the Party Monster soundtrack and slept on sofas, or crammed into one double bed. I must have had anguish… but I can’t remember it now. That time, much like my brief stint working in Jenners, consists only of sepia-tinted memories of pure happiness. 

I feel like I’ve had so many iterations of this one life of mine. These are just two of them.

Is this why we crave nostalgic moments? Why we grieve the hallways we can no longer walk down? As, looking back on my past, there are clear markers I can draw in my mind to define each step I made through my own history. I was a glitter-coated Jenners shop girl; I was a late-night chaos in a vintage dress… 

As we get older and the years blend it gets harder to identify how much we’ve changed, the ways in which we have adapted and grown. Do we cling onto the remnants of our past, not because we want to go back there, but because we need the reminder of our younger selves? 

We can brush off these feelings easily, I can say I am sad about Jenners as it’s a piece of history, gone. That I keep old dresses under my bed as I wish I would one day be able to fit them again. But those things aren’t true. Nostalgia serves me, I think, because it shows me how far I’ve come. 

We need to shed layers, leave behind snakeskin memories, move on. But leaving jobs, friendships, houses, closing doors for new, unknown openings can be painful. Anyone who has moved out of a home of significance will know the feeling; of being torn between old life and new.

When you’ve lost someone these moments come with an extra layer of emotion. When my family home was sold, the place where I watched my mum sing in the kitchen; the place where I watched her die… It sparked a whole new wave of grief. The dresses that no longer fit are ones my grandma liked on me, in muted lilacs, soft yellows. When I worked in Jenners they were both alive. 

Many of us will want to inhabit rooms we once laughed in, cried in, in the hope that we can feel them in the air, somehow. We cling onto the past because it had them in it. 

It’s a sweet, sad feeling to be a tourist of your own past. But it’s one I like to do, not just so I can see how far I’ve travelled, but also as a way to keep those I miss fresh. I can sometimes feel them in the dust, floating in the air. 

It’s part of why, I believe, there was such a uproar about The Crooked House fire. Locals watched as their memories turned to ash. But, as demonstrated within those flames, the physical building and objects where we store our recollections, come with no guarantees. And neither do our minds. I’ve spoken before about how our memories are unreliable, how we want our brain to be like a library, under our control and it’s anything but. 

All we can know is that every version of ourselves that we lose, every person that we have to say goodbye to, they are weaved into our very beings… we carry them with us, whether we can see it or not. 

Please share with me your thoughts on nostalgia… places you like to visit, objects you’ve kept, why do they mean so much to you? I’d love to hear.