"I've lost the people who made it good"

This chapter is different from the others and I want to say so at the start. Some of the good old days were good because of people, and some of those people are dead, and when you go back, you're going to see them. That isn't a bias. That's grief, and this book has no argument with it.

Grief has its own shape and it doesn't follow the fade. The loss of a person can stay hot for years, and the warmth of the memory and the ache of the absence arrive together, and you wouldn't want it otherwise, because the ache is the shape the love takes now. If the good old days are mostly a way of being with someone who isn't here, then what you're doing when you go back is mourning, and mourning is right, and it takes as long as it takes.

The NHS pages on grief point to Cruse Bereavement Support, among others, for anyone who wants help with it, and say to see a GP if you're feeling increasingly low or anxious or the low mood has lasted more than two weeks. I'd add that grief for someone long gone can still be grief, and that it's never too late to get help with it, and that a lot of people who think they have a nostalgia habit have a grief they haven't been able to put down anywhere.

Here's where the golden version and the grief part company, though, and it's worth seeing. The grief is about the person. The golden version is about the era, and it borrows the person to make its case. "It was better then" becomes true because they were alive then, and the whole decade gets their glow, and the present gets judged as the time without them, which it is, but it also has other people in it, some of whom are sitting next to you and would like to be seen. The golden version can crowd out the grief. Instead of missing one person, clearly, you find yourself missing a decade, vaguely, and the vagueness is easier to live in than the grief and does less for you.

So keep the person and lose the era. Miss them by name. Go and see them on purpose, which is chapter 21, and tell someone about them, which is what the visit is for. And let the rest of nineteen ninety-six be what it was, a year with them in it and with a great deal else, some of it bad, and let today be a year without them and with a great deal else, some of it good, and let the two years stop fighting over a loss that belongs to neither of them.