I am not sure if the Romans had a penchant for the good old days, or whether Medievals hankered for a time before plague or civil war, or maybe facial warts, this recalled with a long, knowing glint in their watering-up eyes. But nostalgia, that sentimental yearning for an earlier, supposedly happier time, is very much a modern phenomena if not an ancient one.

Just look at any social media post by those getting on in years, or at least entering serious adulthood, and there will be references, perhaps even embedded videos, harking back to an earlier golden age. Republicans in the U.S talk wistfully of the Reagan era as if a magic palliative for all the ills of that nation once existed and is now lost. Every four years they seek to retrieve it, invoking the Gipper's name in reverent tones.

Music has a particularly powerful hold on the sentimentalized memory and these days you can relive your youth (and those moments that you now deem to have been watershed-like) with any number of age-specific radio stations. In fact you can cacoon yourself inside this world entirely - in the car, whilst jogging, at home and so forth.

I have tried to find a way out of this dilemma, not by rejecting the past, which is just piling folly on folly, but by being a detached critic of memory. Is it reasonable to assume that every time we recall events past, we do so through lens of the previous recollections? Is this not a mental game of Chinese Whispers for one?

Sometimes this isn't the case. There are moments when a sight or a smell or taste or hearing a song goes straight to that part of the mind, a place where the memory is invoked perhaps for the first time. I don't know what that is, whether it is true, or somewhat true, or just another mediated act of remembering with all the usual complications.

But I do know that those moments have a particular clarity and are remarkable, and time-bending.

(Below: All things considered though, it is useful to be clear-eyed about nostalgia, for those memories can be a little fuzzy.....)