Chasing Nostalgia, Blogotober Day 7

I have been feeling a lot of nostalgia lately, especially as my kids are getting older. I see a lot of parents who had children the same time as me waving their kids off to university at this time of year, but I won’t see that happen. My older teen is so sick we are lucky to get her out of the bedroom than to university. My younger teen failed her first year in college and is starting all over again. My youngest is just starting his GCSE years so we’ll see. It makes me feel nostalgic for my studying years though. I did my degree when I was in my late 20s. I had two young children and completing assignments was really difficult. I did a lot of work at home but I did get the experience of university by staying Cardiff and Sussex university. I fully engaged in university life and by that I meant I studied from morning to night to get my work done. I graduated when I was 30 years old.

Someone mentioned harvest festivals the other day and that made me feel nostalgic. I remember as far back as when I was at school and we used to have to take something in for the harvest festival collection which was then distributed amongst the elderly people in our community. These days families are lucky enough to have enough food for themselves let alone to give away. But, we didn’t have much back then either, so it’s strange how we could give without thought, when now we are more likely to be waiting for hand outs. I remember my Mum getting free butter in the 1980s because of the ‘butter mountain’ she could also get cans of food with no labels so you had no idea what they were until opened, it could have been meat or fruit. (My Mum was a widow with two young children and we survived on her widow’s pension, which was actually lower than the other benefits available to single mum’s at the time!) Some real nostalgia there!

Autumn Nostalgia

The Autumn months also make me feel nostalgic for making the last of the drier days with the kids. Getting to the park before it began to get dark, or it was too wet or cold. We’d pick blackberries or come back with a bag full of leaves and conker which we would bring home and make into arts and crafts. Well, maybe not the blackberries, they’d be washed and eaten 🙂