Nostalgia Interviews with Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Sally Bernard who was a schoolteacher for many years, currently living in Deal, Kent. She originally wanted to run an antique shop but her father played a key role in the career route that she followed.

Sally talks about her involvement with Sure Start, and why she disagreed with the late Glenys Kinnock on reading by osmosis. We learn why Sally wanted to be a better teacher than the teachers who had taught her, and Sally also reflects on the nature of the teaching experience.

She went to the Open University and worked as a community education officer at an aquarium in Bermuda.

Sally discusses growing up in Bristol and looking after international friends from various countries in Europe when she was young. Her father had been a medical officer in Belsen and her mother had been a nurse.

We talk about the role that technology plays and how she still sends letters and we find out why New Zealand was such a precious place for Sally and her husband Adrian to live, and how it matched their expectations.

We find out why Sally likes revisiting the past and why she doesn’t have any regrets. We also talk about the nature of home and whether she would consider any places more ‘home’ than others.

She remembers time off from work when she was living in London to see a very bloody production of Julius Caesar at the Barbican, and we turn to the nature of private education, and why there weren’t many good role models for Sally in her day. The best one was a dance teacher who was fired because she had taught her pupils dances from West Side Story.

Then, at the end of the interview we discover why Sally is neither a looking back nor a looking forward type of person.

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interviews podcast to meet Sally Nicholls who was at Lampeter from 1992-95 where she studied Welsh.

Originally from Llantrisant, Sally grew up in the countryside, and she talks about her passion for horse riding, which she even accomplished in India. Sally could have gone to university in Bangor, North Wales, but ended up in Lampeter, a place with which she fell in love. Living in a Welsh speaking community was an extra bonus.

We learn that Sally cannot ever remember not speaking Welsh and has been working in the area of Welsh language education since 1996.

Sally’s favourite childhood film was The Wizard of Oz and she enjoyed Jason Donovan when she was growing up, and is, to this day, a huge fan of Neil Diamond, whom she has seen perform around the world, including at three venues in America, and nearly saw him in Australia. She has also written to another of her idols, Michael Palin, and we find out why he is the only man who has ever left Sally lost for words, and how she postponed the start of a holiday to Turkey so that she could see him in Cardiff.

We find out how Sally got the travel bug, including the three months she spent in Patagonia. It wasn’t the best time to go because it is when Covid hit, and which significantly impacted on what she was able to do while there. Sally talks about the huge differences of experience of dealing with Covid in South America compared with the UK.

Sally talks about the positive experiences that can be gleaned from that period, and we talk too about what we think it would have been like in Lampeter if the pandemic had hit then in the 1990s.

We also talk about what from Sally’s undergraduate days feels strange from today’s perspective, including the evolution over the years from cash to contactless payments.

Then, at the end of the interview, we find out what Sally’s younger self would have thought about the route she has taken, and whether she is a looking back or a looking forward kind of person, and why for Sally it is important to live in the present moment.

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interview to meet Safeer Khan. Safeer is Imam at a mosque in Gillingham where he has been based since 2014.  He leads the prayers every day and takes classes at the mosque. We learn about the Indian origins of his Ahmadiyya community which has about 35,000 members in the UK.

Safeer talks about misunderstandings around caliphs and the role of the mosque as helper for the wider community and the importance of challenging misconceptions. We discuss Islamophobia, and how Safeer tries to combat that, and Safeer recounts confrontations he has experienced with Britain First.

We talk about different ways of dealing with violence and what happens when people are fed hate, and why we should never give up on people.

We talk about Israel-Gaza and whether it’s a political or a religious war and Safeer recounts his experience of meeting a former IDF officer on Rochester High Street. We talk about whether the conflict in Israel and Gaza will ever end, and the dangers of future generations being radicalized.

He talks about the importance of holding our political leaders accountable and why he dislikes politics, and Safeer talks about what Muslims believe, including the different meanings of jihad.

He was born in Norway and we find out about Safeer’s own journey to where he is now, including living in Sierra Leone, and why the people from that country, with whom he played football, were spiritually strong. He has also lived and worked in Spain and Pakistan.

Safeer reflects on the importance of gratefulness and whether we can be nostalgic for negative experiences and how we can learn from the past. We also discuss whether they can bring people closer to God.

Then, at the end of the interview, we learn why Safeer is both a looking back and a looking forward type of person, and how we cannot change the past but can change the future.

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interviews podcast to meet Simon Smith who was at Lampeter from 1988-91, where he studied Religious Studies, and then stayed on for the Interfaith Studies MA.

Simon worked in a bank for six years before going to university, and we find out why he chose Lampeter of all places, and he reflects on the shape of the department of Theology and Religious in those days. He talks about how he could never have expected to write an essay on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy before embarking on his course.

We talk about the perennial question ‘Are you religious?’ and why it is important to study religion without having to subscribe to a particular tradition.

Simon explains why he enjoyed the interactive element of MA teaching, and we learn about his work at the Philosophical and Religious Studies Study Centre in Leeds.

Simon was born in Chester, moved to Hull and then near Birmingham, and we talk about Simon’s music interests including the blog he writes. He was nine years old when he bought his first single, and we learn that his mother had the Light Programme on during the day when he was very young. His father was a BP tanker driver and Simon remembers once picking out a jukebox single while on one of the journeys.

We find out too about Simon’s radio memories including John Peel’s shows, and listening to the charts on Tuesday lunchtimes when he would write down the Top 40 as it was being broadcast and would then share it with his friends at school. It was the centre of the week. Simon also used to create his own charts.

Simon shares his thoughts on the music press and seeing John Peel and Gary Numan on Top of the Pops, and hearing the news of the death of John Lennon on Radio 1. We discuss the role of cultural memories and the death of cultural icons, as well as the seminal role played by Miles Davis and seeing The Damned perform on The Old Grey Whistle Test.

We talk about quasi-memories and whether we can remember the memories of other people, and at the end of the interview Simon discusses the ways in which bad and good memories have affected him, and he reveals the lesson that he would impart to his younger self.

My guest this week is Louise Naylor, who spent 34 years at the University of Kent before retiring in September 2023 as Director of Education. Louise started on a one year temporary lectureship in 1989, and we talk about the role of serendipity and opportunity and the recipe for staying the course and how one can never be prepared for everything that arises in a teaching context.

The best teaching is when the teacher is continually learning, and we discuss the performance side of education which is two-way. Louise reflects on how people often tell us when we get things wrong but not when we get things right, and how Covid meant that teachers and learners were on a level playing field.

Louise talks about the changes she has experienced since was an undergraduate in Aberdeen where she studied biochemistry in an age when it was heavily male-dominated and no one was on first name terms. She was the first in her family to go to university.

Louise went to Canada to do her PhD, and turned down Cambridge to go there. We talk about the role of fate, whether we believe in it or not, the notion of ‘simple abundance’, and we discover why Louise is a 'journey' rather than a 'destination' person.

We also talk about how learning is about challenging ourselves and about the need to try something new in her retirement.

Louise grew up in Edinburgh and these days listens to Boom Radio. She has played the violin in the university orchestra and used to play the university church organ. Music has been a major part of her life, and we learn that much of her social life was built around the church when she was growing up.

Towards the end of the interview we find out why Louise didn’t take up opportunities that came up to go elsewhere, how she feels about uncertainty and how we can deal with it, and accepting that the negative happens, the importance of listening and the role of passion and compassion, and learning about the impact one has had on people’s lives.

My guest this week is Matt Harrington who studied English at Lampeter from 1991-94. There are many great undergraduate reminisces here, beginning with a recollection of the circumstances around our graduation in July 1994.

Matt worked in a bookshop post-Lampeter and then as a junior copywriter, and he talks about how this enabled him to write with economy, and how that played out in his student days when it came to submitting essays.

Matt reveals how he managed to avoid reading lots of Victorian novels, and why he gelled with his peers because we were all arts and humanities students (there is a fascinating thread about Informatics being an outlier).

We reflect on how a city university wouldn’t have been right for us and we refer to a contemporary of ours, Alexis Athena De Winter, and the way Lampeter was a very accepting environment. Matt talks about being born in London but made in Lampeter, and we discuss the transgressive nature of Lampeter.

We talk about the skills developed from our time in university, with some people having gone into politics, and we reflect on what our children today would make of the world we once inhabited in a town without a railway station or cinema.

Matt was born in London and then moved to Kent at the age of three, and we talk about how so many students were from the Home Counties. He also refers to having transported Lampeter to London after he left.

We discuss our musical memories and Matt remembers listening to Atlantic 252 back in his student days, and we find out which was the only song he would play on the upstairs Union jukebox where they never changed the discs.

Then, at the end of the interview, we remember the 1992 General Election, which took place in the April of our first year, and Matt reveals why he is a chronic nostalgic. 

My guest this week is James Grindrod who was in Lampeter from 1993-96 where he studied Single Honours History. James talks about the impact of what he did on his life and career, and how learning is not just something that stops when you finish your full time education.

We discuss different lenses of looking at the past, including how we might have once thought that things were ‘getting better’, but that the events of the last decade or so might militate against that way of looking at history.

James talks about always having been a nostalgic person, and we touch on the relationship between Christmas and nostalgia. We talk about the epidemic of loneliness and how people came together during the time of the Second World War, and we reflect on the role played by diary accounts.

We talk about how we live in a world now where every facet of our lives is recorded, no matter how mundane, in contrast to the past, and we focus on the role of ordinary experiences.

James was born and grew up in North London, and he recently re-walked the same streets, and we find out why James doesn’t like change. It turns out that James and I lived in the same room in Lampeter, two years apart.

We talk about what happens when one meets up again with people you haven’t seen for many years, about losing people close to us, the role of life experience, and we talk about the events from childhood we are more liable to remember.

Then, at the end of the interview, we find out why the dichotomy of being a looking back or looking forward type of person is not an attractive one for James.

This week’s episode is a Christmas special as I am joined by someone else who has made Christmas their research project in recent years. Lucinda Murphy and I had never met before we recorded this interview in London in October 2023, and there are many parallels and synergies which make this a really compelling discussion around the ‘meaning’ of Christmas.

Lucinda began her doctorate at Durham on Christmas in 2016 at just the time that my own Christmas as Religion was published. Lucinda talks about how the impetus for her work was that so little has been written on contemporary views of Christmas and she discusses why people don’t always think it is a subject worthy of study.

Lucinda reflects on whether the study of Christmas was going to ruin Christmas for her personally and how it feels to live for so long in such a liminal period of time. She discusses also how Covid impacted on her research vis-à-vis the tropes of celebration and crisis and she talks about the notion of emotional dissonance.

Lucinda uses the metaphor of a mirror to talk about Christmas and on how nostalgia was a way into Christmas for her (I made the reverse journey) and we both identify ourselves as introverted extroverts. We find out too about her previous research interviewing ex-choristers at Durham Cathedral.

Lucinda talks about how Christmas holds up a mirror to key transitions in our life and questions of wellbeing, her fear of the ivory tower, and how this has led to her doing mentoring work in a special needs school.

We talk about how we can’t escape Christmas and how people can be alienated because bad things (including, for some of her participants, divorces and miscarriages) have happened to them at this time of year.

Lucinda reflects on the two types of anticlimax bound up with Christmas, and how people often think that the true meaning of Christmas has been lost, irrespective of whether one subscribes to the Christan faith or not, and how the ‘Christmas lament’ is an integral part of the reflection bound up with Christmas.

Lucinda draws on the analogy of Disney, discusses Christmas as a paradox, and reflects on whether the Christmas spirit is something spiritual.

Then, towards the end of the interview, we find out about Gelf the Elf, Lucinda’s research assistant, who enabled her to tell the underside of the story of Christmas, and how she subverted the difference between subject and object.

Then, at the very end, we find out what is Lucinda’s favourite Christmas film and song.

My guest this week is Henry Jeppesen, a freelance literary translator, who studied Single Honours Swedish at Lampeter from 1993-97. We learn about Henry’s Scandinavian background, find out why he fell in love with Lampeter and what happened on his Year Abroad.

In his time at university, Henry sat on the Ents Committee and remembers seeing Zodiac Mindwarp and Doctor and the Medics perform – though we learn that he didn’t quite manage to bring Oasis or Blur to Lampeter!

We learn about the impact Lampeter had on Henry, including the Students’ Union, and Henry reflects on what it would have been like to be at a different university.

Henry talks about learning a language from scratch, what it was like to go to Lampeter from a small town, and growing up in Norfolk.

We find out about the gigs Henry went to when young, including Def Leppard and he tells us whether he goes for the artists’ old or new music. Another of his favourite bands is The Manic Street Preachers, and we reflect on the fanzines that existed when we were young.

We talk about our chart obsessions. Like me, Henry bought the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles. He has always been into music, and he remembers the time that he went to see U2 in concert in Cape Town.

Henry shares some of the advice he has been given along the way as far as translating is concerned and he talks about how he has been able to use his Swedish professionally.

We also find out how Henry’s parents met, how life has worked out for him and how he has reconnected with people through social media.

And, at the end of the interview, Henry reflects on whether he is a looking back or a looking forward type of person.

My guest this week is John Wills, Professor of American Media and Culture, who has been at the University of Kent since 2005. We discover that John owns various consoles and machines from the 1970s onwards and we find out where his academic interests, e.g. in video games, have come from.

John talks about how the things he is interested in emanate from his teenage years, as with cataloguing films, and we discuss defining oneself and having an attachment to something, and the way it can lead to academic pursuits.

John also worked in a video store when young, he initially started a degree in Architecture, and we discuss how we make sense of our pasts and work things out, finding patterns along the way.

John talks about why being a teenager was not always helpful and what he has learned from those days, including depression, and we discuss whether any of this can be talked about with others, e.g. revisiting elements from childhood.

He grew up in Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, and his family then moved near Birmingham and Bristol. We find out that his parents would go to the cinema and he saw in the mid-70s Benji and Star Wars. John talks about the comfort of going to the cinema.

John recalls the time a few years ago when two men had a fight in the cinema auditorium in Ashford before watching Creed II, and we discover which films really mattered to John when he was growing up, e.g. dystopian films such as Logan’s Run.

We find out about John’s taste in horror when growing up, and we talk about violence in ‘real’ life compared to violence in the movies, and being conflict-averse – and that John watches horror films at the cinema with a fellow Buddhist.

We find out if John has ever walked out of a film, and what happened when he and his partner took their young son to see Barbie at the cinema in summer 2023.

Then towards the end of the interview we find out why his younger self would be shocked to find out what he is doing now, what happened to the diaries he kept when young, and why John has some discomfort in looking back.