Finding collection of old letters filled me with nostalgia
ON my day off this week I dived into a pool of nostalgia and unapologetically let the waves wash over me.
It started with a simple conversation with a friend about the Dutch footballing team and ended with me laughing like a fool at letters I was sent from friends more than 30 years old.
My pal Adrian and I were exchanging messages about our love for the classic Holland side which reached two World Cup finals in the 1970s.
Within minutes I was opening cupboards and pulling out drawers knowing my 1978 Panini sticker album was somewhere in the house.
I am sure most of your remember them and for all I know they are still going in some guise, but the sight of – mostly male – kids in a huddle shouting
“got, not got” as one of them flicked through his swaps in the playground was part of my growing up. Anyhow, I digress. Thankfully, Mrs Naylor said she thought said incomplete (I never finished one) album might be in a box under the stairs and with dust flying as I dragged it out from its years of slumber there it was near the top of the pile. I smiled triumphantly as I brushed of its dark blue cover, which showed the flags of the competing nations in a circle, the trophy itself and a cartoon of a good-looking striker heading the ball. Then I opened it up and immersed myself in the content, even surprising myself at how close to actually finishing the album I got 36 stickers to be precise, easily the nearest in any of the ones I collected over the years before I grew out of it and moved on to something else instead.
But what else was in the box that I probably hadn’t seen in the best part of 20 years? A smorgasbord of tasty historical artefacts from my growing up, that’s what.
I immediately remembered the green ring binder as containing my cricket scorecards from summers spent at Trent Bridge complete with autographs of the great and the good from that era.
Derek Randall, Richard Hadlee, Clive Rice, all heroes of mine from those days.
I even found the one Geoff Boycott reluctantly signed for me after a long day in the field before telling me, then aged 13, where to go in not very polite English.
But perhaps the items that brought the biggest smile to my face as I tipped the box out on to the floor to wallow in the past were a handful of letters my oldest friends sent home to me from their various universities when I chose not to immediately carry on my education after my A-levels, whereas most of them did.
Tales of very mild debauchery in student union bars, lost lusts, failed young relationships and the seething insecurities of living away from home for the first time all flooded back to me.
This contact and correspondence was all we had in a world before email, social media, mobile phones and the comforts we all enjoy now.
A case in point is that I immediately WhatsApped said mates, most of whom I am still lucky to still call my friends more than three decades on, to tell them about my finds in the Aladdin’s Cave that was the box from under the stairs.
If, like me, you have kept a similar snapshot of your life and have it ticked away in the loft or such like I would heartily recommend you dig it out and dive in.
After all, lockdown life doesn’t look like ending anytime soon.