There’s a very real danger involved in mulling over our own yesteryears. Care about a particular era too much and you become the type for whom, for example, constantly talking about the ‘good times we had at school’ is completely acceptable. They were indeed enjoyable, those days when we worked weekends up the shopping village for four quid an hour, spending all our pay on nights out in the ex-mill towns of West Yorkshire. But they were also full of horrible stuff like puberty, a lack of personal autonomy and terrible, gel-based hairstyles. Dismiss the merits of your past too forcefully, however, and you end up in a perpetual cycle of snorting ketamine and hunting out craft brewery taprooms, attempting in vain to prove to yourself that ‘I am undeniably an adult: butterscotch shots and dancing to Pantera are for the kids.’
