Why the good old days feel true

Before I argue with the golden version, I want to be fair to it, because it's made of real things and it's doing something for you.

It really happened. You were there. The summer was warm and the friends were funny and the flat was yours and the country did feel a certain way. This isn't a fantasy. It's a memory, and memories are of things.

The feeling is real too. When you go back there, something in you warms, and that warmth is as real as any feeling you have in the present, and often stronger than most of them. A thing that produces a feeling that strong isn't nothing.

The present has real problems. You're not imagining them. You're older, some things hurt, some people are gone, prices are what they are, the news is what it is. Anyone pointing out the present's problems isn't being unfair.

Everyone agrees. Say "it was better then" in any pub in the country and heads will nod, and the nodding feels like evidence.

It's a comfort. On a hard evening, nineteen ninety-six is somewhere to go, and it's warm there, and nobody can take it from you.

And it keeps people alive. The ones in the photograph who aren't here any more are here in the golden version, and going back is going to see them, and giving that up feels like losing them twice.

There are needs under all this. To feel that life has had good in it. To be connected to people you've lost. To have somewhere warm to go on a cold evening. To make sense of change. Those are good needs and I'll show you that they're met better by the whole record than by the golden version, and that the visit does all of them without the sigh. What I'll show is that the golden version isn't the past. It's a picture of the past made by a process that removes problems, and that the present is being compared not to how things were but to how they've come to look.