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Nostalgia

There's nothing quite like a sudden rush of nostalgia. A song, a smell, a toy, anything can set off that feeling. Not that's its particularly unpleasant but the desire it raises inside to go back to a simple time, is often overwhelming and for the briefest second, you can almost believe it is possible to go back, just once.

We ask ourselves why we didn't know just how good we had it back when we were young, all the wonderful things we had, the power of youth, the vulnerability of allowing someone to be in charge of your life.

The memories I treasure most are those when we were a 'family.' Of course that didn't happen as much as I wanted, and living with an alcoholic father was difficult for everyone. But, I can't help recalling the feeling of long summer days playing with my brother's outside, in the sand pit or cycling to the local water park. We used to sit around for hours playing 'teddy bears' creating whole worlds for our toys; they went to school, they had families and they died and were 'reincarnated.' The imagination of children is unsurpassed for the rest of adult life, and it makes me smile to think of some of the games we created or the hours we spent trying to plot to take as many teddy bears on holiday as we could.

I wonder what lessons I brought from my childhood into my adult life, certainly not all of them. When I was younger, we hardly used to watch TV, it was only on during the evening and rarely during the weekends and we didn't have mobile phones, we didn't spend hours online, staring at a screen. My life is different now, I sit back and I know that I should watch less TV and spend more time working out, eat fewer sweets and put my mobile phone away once in a while. But I don't, I choose my actions and we make mistakes.

Childhood was a time where anything was possible; I wanted to write books, so I would write books, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to support myself doing that. My dreams were alive with promise and imagination, I could be anything or anyone. It was only as innocence faded and the reality of money crushed my hope, that I had to let go of some of the ambitions I had once had. I shed my childhood like a coat, leaving it behind to be remembered but never revisited.

Remember Christmas? Not as it is now, with money being the primary objective, but the way it used to be when you waited anxiously for Christmas Eve, with that excited, fluttery feeling in the pit of your stomach. That Christmassy feeling,

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