Last week I met a friend in the town where we first met as students. Apart from attending an open day with my children once, I hadn’t returned in decades.
Walking up from the station, I expected to be filled with hiraeth, an untranslatable Welsh word which, like the Portuguese Saudade, broadly means a kind of melancholy nostalgia.
As a student I made the mile and a half walk from station to college many times. It was often very late at night and, not having money for a taxi, I would walk very fast through town and across the college fields hoping to avoid any ne’er do wells. (My parents never knew and I’m not sure I’ve ever told them.)
Despite my anticipation however, I walked up that once familiar street and felt no hiraeth whatsoever.
I passed the place where I think I went to for my twenty-first birthday meal with my college friends. It was an Italian restaurant then. It’s a music venue now. There’s something incongruous about this half-timbered, wattle-and-daub building which was then draped with artificial grapes and is now advertising open mic opportunities.
Temptation in the form of bookshops, antique shops and independent shops full of pretty things slowed me down. Then… was that where my dentist was? Was that building once my hairdresser’s? Surely that was once Woolworths? And wasn’t that once the Athena shop where I used to buy posters for my bedroom wall?
Quite possibly I was wrong about them all. It didn’t really matter.
Apart from my former bank, the only things I recognised were things that have been there for centuries without materially changing: the Cathedral and the Cross.
I walked a little further and met my friend rushing the other way. We hadn’t met in the flesh since before Covid so there was a risk we wouldn’t recognise each other, but we did, and we went to have lunch and catch up on what had happened in the last few years that we didn’t already know.
‘Do you remember…?’ said my friend about a series of places in town which I’d entirely forgotten.
‘Didn’t you spend much time in town?’ she asked when I shook my head.
The thing was that I did. But I also went for cycle rides, on my own or with another friend who’d wanted to join us but couldn’t, or with my then boyfriend. I climbed the local hillfort, I visited the Harbour. Once, at least, I cycled to Southampton. I went on train trips to see my gran or my parents or school friends who were in different universities.
Mostly I wandered around in town too, only the finer details evade me completely now.
My friend and I visited the cathedral which we both remembered well, not least because we both sang in the choir and took part in Christmas concerts there.
‘I remember this aisle being a lot longer,’ she said.
‘We were in long skirts, carrying candles and singing slowly,’ I said.
‘True.’
Perhaps my lack of nostalgia is partly because I’ve (so far) never put roots down anywhere longer than twenty years. I don’t have enough fingers to count how many places I’ve lived in and to feel nostalgic about them all would be overwhelming. Each of them has left something with me, I remember most with fondness, but take me back to any of them and I feel like a visitor.
On reflection, I don’t mind.
I may not recall the teashops and pubs, but I remember the friends I was with. I can’t remember what we talked about, or even really what we looked like. But when I looked in my friend’s eyes, her essential lovely soul was the same. Physical changes that years have made disappear when you look in someone’s eyes. And despite all the setbacks and heartbreaks the last few years have brought her, at heart I know the essential her is still there in the process of healing. I was glad to hug her and listen to her and talk not just of a distant past we can’t really remember, or of a recent one which holds pain for her, but of a future that will help her lovely soul to blossom as it should.
No I don’t remember the finer details of those days, but I remember who we were.
I remember choosing posters and books that portrayed who I wanted to be rather than who I was. I remember sitting in pubs with my then boyfriend (poor chap) tying his brain in knots with my assertions of black and white certainties I am no longer certain of. I remember cycling to the lazy south coast because I was lonely for the wilder Gower waves. I remember getting lost with my other friend walking through fields of yellow on the way back from the hill fort. I remember the Christmas procession down the candlelit cathedral aisle. I remember being young and doubtful and foolish and confused and impetuous and illogical and angry and sad and happy and in love and heartbroken.
If I felt any hiraeth at all, it was perhaps for the girls that we were, including the friend who couldn’t join us. All three of us were shy and out of synch with our own generation.
We were the first drafts of people we are still becoming.
And that’s what I remembered and recognised and saluted, not with nostalgia but simply with acknowledgement. That was then. This is now, but the goods and bads of then, have helped to form now and are worth a raised glass (or cup of tea as we were both driving – then or later).
Rather than feel nostalgia, I felt a warm, fuzzy, joy to be back somewhere where I was once very happy and to be meeting one of two people who made it happy.
We were first drafts of ourselves then. Who knows what draft we are now. But one day, we will be masterpieces.
Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).
