Nostalgia (a yearning for a golden, bygone age) is present, to a greater or lesser degree in all of us. This hankering for the past runs through much poetry and is beautifully expressed by A. E Housman in his “A Shropshire Lad”:

“INTO my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again”.

In the above lines, Housman evokes a happy childhood. The recollection of which is, however tinged with regret, hence “into my heart an air that kills”. We cannot, try as we might, recreate the past and melancholy oft creeps into our soul when gazing back.

Nostalgia frequently expresses itself in a wistful evocation of a vanishing way of life. Take…