Nostalgia and how ageing ramps it up a tad
Or how a holiday to Spain brought back a lot of dormant memories
I’ve just returned from a family holiday in Spain. If I say ‘package holiday’ and ‘family friendly/all inclusive,’ then you get the gist.
What I’ve noticed since turning 50 (even when I write that it has an edge of surreal-ness) is that memories that were dormant are now resurfacing. In small glimpses here and there. There’s a lot of nostalgia too.
My teens were spent running.
My twenties were also running.
My thirties were spent on a treadmill where things kept going, but I continued to avoid the big issues. Then forties was about FERTILITY, BIRTH and MOTHERHOOD.
These themes obviously continue (the motherhood one anyway) and yet it feels like the first time that I have stopped, poked my head above water, and started to reflect on my life.
What is nostalgia? It’s defined as: a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past.
On holiday there was a kids-club run by people in their late teens and early twenties. They were probably all in their twenties actually (everyone under thirty looks incredibly youthful to me these days- even newsreaders look like teenagers to me). This group were full of energy, they were required to spontaneously dance (there were two songs on repeat- both Spanish dance classics that I’d never heard before but now can’t get out of my head). They led aqua aerobics sessions, they did strange theatre with masks in the evening, led karaoke sessions and generally had massive smiles for the guests who tended to over-index on grumpiness and dissatisfaction (British people who go away and then spend the whole time away comparing the hotel to their home and feeling fed up). I developed a fascination with these people.
They bought back memories of teenage holidays in Spain with my best friend Amy.
These holidays were hedonistic. They weren’t any screens so life was generally experienced face to face. Her family weren’t hedonistic but Amy and I tested the boundaries. We went out. We hitchhiked to bars. We got lifts to this massive night club that was beside the motorway. Sometimes we walked up the side of the motorway wearing very little. One time we got in a car and there was as gun under the front seat. We laughed and thought this was funny. We were immortal and nothing could touch us. We swam in the sea late at night. We never drank water or put on proper sunscreen. We obsessed about what to wear but usually wore denim shorts with vest tops. Men called ‘Madonna’ as we went past. We were channeling that early Madonna energy a lot. We drank any alcohol - any alcohol that we came across no matter how strong it was. We smoked a brand of cheap cigarettes that made us grimace - Ducados- maybe? And we coughed like old men. I was in the first phase of ‘extreme disassociation’ which didn’t end for another twenty-odd years. I embraced any method that got me away from my thoughts.
We were like a Pepsi Max advert. The two of us. Adventures and boys. Each year I would resume a relationship with a barman called Juan Jo. The relationship consisted of him giving me cigarettes (good ones that didn’t make me cough and splutter), and the odd free drink, and me trying to converse with him in Spanish. We conducted our relationship chiefly through eye contact. We never kissed. He told me I was the most beautiful girl he had ever clapped eyes on (or something to that effect). He held my hands and smiled a lot at me. He looked at me in a way that made me feel like I was special.
It would have been dubious by todays standards because he was in his early twenties and I was in my teens (however this was common then and my first couple of boyfriends were always older). It was unrequited love. Imagine George Michael in Club Tropicana days and you get a bit of the feel.
Watching these kids doing the Macarena, these young people because they weren’t really kids (I see everyone under thirty as a ‘kid’) these memories of Juan Jo flooded back. My life was poking me in the side and reminding me of this dude over and over. I hadn’t thought of him for many years.
Did he ever think about me? Did he ever sit in an all-inclusive package holiday resort and remember the years we spent flirting? Did he have grey hair now and a bit of a paunch? Had his tattoos faded?
Memories of being pulled behind a speed boat at night and my body lighting up with green bioluminescence, my reflection in the car wing mirror as Amy’s dad drove us to the beach in the afternoon- my face tanned and my hair blowing wildly out the window, Amy’s brother, Jasper, sitting up against a wall covered in olive oil trying to ‘catch as much tan as possible,’ before he flew home, Amy’s Dad putting a chicken foot on my shoulder before he threw it into a paella and me freaking out as he pulled a tendon and it eerily moved on its own as if still a living thing.
An idealised version of holidays where you spring out of a chair and have boundless enthusiasm. Where you don’t have to start each day packing a bag which caters to the every whim and need of other people who are not yourself. The time when you asked yourself - what do I want right now?
This nostalgia is nonsense because you never remember the past accurately. You have a hotch porch of visuals that you draw from, but the underlying emotions are hard to grasp. I was miserable a lot of the time. I only allowed myself to get wild and disinhibited when I was drunk. I thought everyone was wildly beautiful and I was a fat goose with a big nose. I longed for someone to tell me that I was special (I was a walking time bomb when it came to choosing the wrong men). Nostalgia is about seeing the highlights - the best bits- and throwing the deeper feelings to the side. It’s also the belief that the best things are behind us and there isn't much to look forward to.
On the last day of the holiday I sat with my daughter and watched the show by the pool. One girl leapt in the air, her hair bouncing, her white smile glinting - she was doing the same dance that she did six times a day to rouse the disastisfied tourists from their zombie-sun lounger- phone-scroll slumber. For a moment I felt that energy again, that sense that everything is ahead of you, that it’s all up for grabs, the insecurity, the fear, the comparison, the passion, the longing, the wanting to have the best life possible but unsure how to start. The possibilities. More more more.
I found myself smiling. It was bittersweet. The knowing of the things, the being weighed down by the reality.
What had happened to that damn Juan Jo? Where was he now?
Still a bit of me that wanted to believe that the best was yet to come.