A Generation Finds Comfort Reliving the Not-so-Distant Past

Summary

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LONDON -- Growing up here in the 1980s, my friends and I would mock older generations for always talking about the past: the lady on the bus who claimed that the youths of yesteryear were far more polite than today's rowdy teens; the aging nun who ran our school library and complained that "novels aren't what they used to be"; the retired soldier who lived on our street, bellowing, "They should bring back National Service for you useless gits!" every time we sped past his house on our BMXs.

How lame, we thought, to live in the past. As far as we were concerned, nostalgia was for has-beens, and it rotted the brain. We much preferred the sentiment expressed in a song by the Stone Roses, the biggest British rock band of the time: "The past is yours, but the future's mine."

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Extract

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A Generation Finds Comfort Reliving the Not-so-Distant Past

Yet today, as my generation turns 30-something, we have become the biggest nostalgia-freaks of all. Young adults are as likely to wallow in the past as any old-a...

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