Midsummer Memories

We're well over half way through the dog days of this year and it won't be long till the student life comes knocking once again so it seems like the right time for a little season recap of general goings-on since the return way back in May, it feels like a lifetime ago.
For the most part it's been a pretty solid summer. Time will tell if it goes down as a classic but setting aside the fact that it's still in progress, it's miles ahead of last year when the good times were few and far between. Not one, but two festival's were conquered this year: Glasgowbury showed the maturity to finally recognise the wealth of talent this country has to offer and Download was the next step to more daring adventures. I saw iconic, life-changing bands and while it was on the whole a more musical than social experience, it's still one I won't forget. Pearl Jam followed a week later and I'm still struggling to accept that I actually witnessed 'Jeremy' outside of YouTube and Fighting With Wire and LaFaro were awesome in flying the flag for the homeland.
Over the months there's also been a fair bit of craic thrown about: the world cup, FIFA banter, five a-side, pool tournaments, appalling b-movies, impulse road trips, camp-outs, collective Spotify malarky, McDonald's ventures, movie quoting, drinking games and a week with the house to myself. It's not been a bad one, let's be honest.
But if one thing has for some reason dominated this lazy arse summer it's been a strange longing for the past. I'm normally quite sentimental anyway, I keep absolutely everything and most of it ends up on my bedroom wall in some shape or form, but I've been on an uninterrupted nostalgia binge ever since I set foot back home.
My best guess is that a knee-jerk reaction from being away from home so long spurred me onto rummaging through memory lane. I'd barely unpacked before I literally began to dig through old boxes of 'retro junk'. I'm still not sure why. Perhaps hoping to stumble upon childhood relics or just refreshing my domestic bearings, making sure everything was in the place I remembered it.
My tomb raidings uncovered snippets from my teenage years, late primary school time and infantry and I didn't stop there, it became almost a thriving addiction in seeking out everything that had become forgotten.
The wonders of modern technology allowed me to revisit cartoons and replay ancient video games, each as spine chilling an experience as the last. Wrestling tapes, some over a decade old, cropped up for about a week as well as Pokemon which made a fully fledged comeback. Those games are ageless, as much fun to play as back then. My original Pokemon Red cartridge and purple GameBoy Colour still working like the day I got them, I was hooked on catching 'em all for most of the damn summer! I even forked over for an audio cable that allowed me to digitize cassette tapes, some containing genuine childhood recordings. A treasurous find - imagine speaking now in the voice your used to hearing, then hearing yourself more than a decade ago, it's an indescribable feeling.
My mental bout with the good old days kept re-emerging. I used Amazon to scour the tracklistings of old Now! compilations that embarrassingly used to be my only source of music. Spotify meant I could rediscover corny-classics like 'The Launch' which I'd long dismissed to a forgotten oblivion and so everything that was found in this manner was grouped in the "Cheesier than a bag of wotsits" playlist. I never even liked wotsits.
The '90s was a truly fucking great decade to have grown up and I'm thankful I did, I'll be proud to look back on that decade time and time again. When looking back I always include the early to mid-2000s as 'authentic nostalgia' because I suppose anything before I hit 15 is still, at a stretch, childhood, or adolescence if you must insist. These are the years I'll look back upon so fondly because of the scraps of vibrant pop-culture that are mostly gone from the present day making them ours and no one else's - so feel lucky if you grew up amongst this generation and experience this period in coming of age!
Who knows how long this pigging out on the past will go on for. It might be a sign that things these days aren't as interesting but until it becomes unhealthy i.e. getting in the way of things that need to be done (which isn't a lot at the moment) I'll see how long it lasts, because there's no better feeling than rediscovering something from your younger years.
Now if you'll kindly excuse me, I've a Disney movie spree to get back to!
In a bit.

Source: http://subversedblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/midsummer-memories.html