Nostalgia

A group of seniors in our parish comes together on Tuesdays for a lunch in the Sacred Heart Primary School. Actually, the room where we gather belongs to the West-Indian Chaplaincy and its caretaker is hosting the event. On the other hand, the food served to the seniors comes from the school's kitchen and the pupils of the school are serving the guests as part of their formation in dealing respectfully with elderly people. Both the young and the old love it.

It is inevitable, I guess, that in a group like this the glorious past figures prominently in the conversations. Memories never fail to recall the large number of people that attended the celebrations of the years gone by and how lively the participation was in those days. The conclusion invariably is that all is very different now.

There is no denying the conclusion: the neighbourhood has changed beyond recognition. Aston turned from a white English-Irish neighbourhood into an ethnically mixed population where at present the majority of the inhabitants comes from Pakistan and Bangladesh. There is still a good sprinkle of Afro-Caribbean people, but like the Irish and the English they are declining in number, as the children of the first migrants have progressed and moved to more comfortable quarters elsewhere in the city. So, for those who remained there is much to be nostalgic about.

Nostalgia has its degrees, though. The crucial point is how realistically one deals with the facts, the facts of the past and those of the present. When one stays within the facts, nostalgia is a way of dealing with true losses due to changes in personal and community life. But when nostalga idealises the past to an extent it never was and at the same time is overly critical of the present, then one is in danger of blaming the newcomers for all of one's negative feelings. Then they are held responsible for putting the good old days to an end and bringing in all the problems of the present.

Nostalgia is not just confined to the old-timers, newcomers may suffer from it as well. The migrants who left their country of origin may turn out to be more traditional than those who stayed behind. They may remember vividly the good things they experienced before they moved to Britain and compare these with the negative experiences they had to cope with since they arrived in this country. Then nostalgia becomes a distortion of reality, not just a nurturing of good memories.

Last Saturday British and Asian people clashed in the centre of Birmingham to the horror of the shoppers of all complexions. One wonders how much of it was due to nostalgia gone wrong on both sides, for, sad to say, something innocent in itself has the potential to turn extreme.

Ton