Oh yeah…

Funny how a song - not heard for thirty years - can transport you back through time to a place of fuzzy familiarity. The lyrics can be right there in the forefront of my mind as I am singing along, as if I had played it on repeat only yesterday. And yet a place can vanish forever.

Or does it?

This weekend beloved and son are reenacting the battle of Naseby at Lamport Hall - part of their shared love of Sealed Knot civil war reconstructions. With a grumbling lower seven and a raging sciatic nerve, I’ve retreated six miles up the road to a hotel renowned for its fabulous beds.

But knowing that I am just a few miles up the road from my Alma Mater, I just couldn’t resist a little trip down memory lane. I blame it on the music - Beloved’s album of choice on the way up in the car was Roxy Music. ‘Interesting selection,’ I thought. ‘I haven’t heard that for years,’ but it was one of the many bands my mum had a love for, so I grew up on this stuff. I thought I was being retro, when at nineteen or twenty, I rediscovered them and played them very loudly on the rigged up stereo in my little orange mini. (It was a Sony Walkman plugged into a headphone jack, wired into a couple of speakers in the car).

Fast forward to 2025 and ‘Oh Yeah’ comes on, and I find myself singing along with wild abandon. And yet, driving through my old university town, it was like the mists of time had descended and the me-that-once-was had become completely inaccessible. The only glimmer I had was driving past The Old Cock Inn and having a vague idea, and a random pound shop called ‘Its a Gift’.

I shrugged it off and carried on to the Battle Ground, but when you are a ‘camp follower’ there’s only so much sitting around I can do before I get itchy feet. I had to go back.

So I headed back into the town I had hoped time would forget. It’s one of those places that left me cold. I loved my university days, but the town itself - once an industrial town built on shoes - had died when everything went East, and had turned into a violent force for bad. The local DJ’s favourite trick was to say, ‘hands up if you are a student’ at which point all the townies piled on. We lived next to a big park, and the natural way to get home would have been to cut across it, but nobody did, as it was just not safe. I spent most of the three years I lived there not really going out.

In some ways, I am not surprised my unconscious mind has deleted it. It wasn’t somewhere I ever anticipated coming back to. But being someone who likes to learn from the past when the opportunity arises, I couldn’t resist.

I hit my first challenge with the satnav. The two campuses I studied on seemed to have vanished, and I was left with a ‘waterside’ option - but when I arrived, it was a purpose built new place, that had obviously been created to attract students. Since academia moved into a business model, you have to have something shiny to attract people in, especially the International students who get charged even higher fees than the U.K. based students.

I decided to ditch the sat nav and see if my memory could manage the job on its own. I headed back to the Cock Inn - ‘scuse the pun - as the only landmark I remembered. All roads must lead from there… by using my inner compass I was able to find one campus - now an international school, the giant violent park we had to walk round (the Racecourse) and a pub we used to frequent on a Saturday night - I had no memory that it was called the (ironic) White Elephant though. From there I located the area I lived in - in a house that was so cold we had to wear coats, as every time we turned the gas heaters on we got headaches. And then finally, the main campus - a poorly constructed 1960s affair - which had received the ultimate in accolades. A brand new housing estate of identical box shaped houses entitled ‘Scholar’s Way’ is the only echo that remains.

So all in all, what did I learn?

Well, that we tend to revisit the past to confirm that where we are now is the right place to be. There has been a whole lifetime of experiences for little undergrad me to integrate since I was last in this town. Was I worried for her? In some ways - she was going to encounter a lot of dead-legs before she started to value herself properly. But on the other hand, she got there in the end.

The other positive about visiting the past is that you don’t have to live there. You are only visiting - a tourist in your own past-life, thankful that you are just passing through.

And if all that remains is a Cock and a racecourse, an international school and a housing estate, I think that all those things are best left where they are. I’ll take the skills I learned and leave the rest behind.