Nineteen ninety-six

There's a photograph on the fridge, or on your phone, of a summer. You're twenty-three, or thirty-one, or nine, and the light is doing something the light doesn't seem to do any more, and everyone in it is laughing, and two of them are dead now. You look at it while the kettle boils and you feel the thing you feel, which is warm and then sad, and then the sentence comes, quietly, in your own voice. It'll never be like that again.

Or it's not a photograph. It's a song on the radio in the car. It's a smell outside a bakery. It's a news story about something that's changed, and you say to the person next to you "it wasn't like this when we were young", and they agree, because they always agree, and the two of you spend a pleasant ten minutes in a decade neither of you can visit and come out of it feeling that the present is a poor thin thing and getting thinner.

These are invented, but I'd guess yours is close. Some words. The good old days is your phrase for the years that glow, whichever they are. The golden version is those years as memory hands them to you, with the problems taken out. The whole record is the same years with the problems put back. The fade is the process, which chapter 3 is about, by which the bad in a memory loses its charge faster than the good. The sigh is the moment the sentence arrives, it'll never be like that again, and the small drop that comes with it. The decline story is the wider belief that the world itself, and not only your life, has got worse. A visit is a spell in the past that you chose, that has an end, and that you come back from. Living there is what this book is about instead. And the same distance is chapter 22's idea, that today deserves to be judged from as far off as you judge nineteen ninety-six.

Before you go on, do one thing. Take a piece of paper and write down the good old days. The years, the place, the people. Then, for each one, write down one thing that was wrong at the time. Not wrong in hindsight. Wrong then. The thing you were worried about that summer. The job you were stuck in. The person who wasn't speaking to you. The rent. The illness in the family. The relationship that was failing while the photo was taken. Take your time, because this is hard, and it's hard for a reason that chapter 3 explains. Most people who do this find that the problems were there, that they were serious, that they'd forgotten them entirely, and that the summer in the photograph was also the summer of something they'd have given a great deal at the time to be rid of.