Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit of mind, and it's a quiet one. Somewhere in your past there's a stretch of years that glows. A summer, a house, a job, a version of the country, a version of you. You go back to it in the car and in the bath and at the end of the pub conversation, and every time you come back the present looks a little greyer, and a sentence arrives that you've stopped noticing. It'll never be like that again.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the habit makes sense from the inside, and that the past you remember is real, and the people in it were real, and going back to them does you some good. The second is that the version of the past you visit has had its problems taken out. Not by you, deliberately, but by memory, which does this to everyone, in ways that have been measured, so that the bad fades faster than the good, the feelings get rewritten to match what you think now, and changes in you get read as changes in the world. The good old days had problems, and you had them, and you've forgotten, and the present is being judged against a past that never existed in that form. The third is practical. Put the problems back. Visit the past on purpose and with an end. And judge today from the same distance you judge nineteen ninety-six from, because in twenty years today is going to glow too, and it would be a waste to find that out only then.

This book doesn't ask you to stop loving what you loved, or to pretend things haven't changed, or to be cheerful about losses that are real. Some things were better. Some people are gone. Chapters 13 and 24 are about that, and they don't argue with it.

Two cautions.

If the past feels like the only place where anything was good, and the present has been grey for most of the day, most days, for two weeks or more, that isn't a habit of mind. It may be depression, and the NHS says to see a GP. Please do.

And if the good old days were good because of a person you've lost, some of what you're feeling is grief, and grief has its own shape and its own help, and chapter 13 says where.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.