Last week, I found myself looking at the house I spent most of my teenage years in, through Google Street View on my laptop screen. I had spoken to someone on the phone for work and during the conversation I discovered that they had grown up in the same small village as I did, at roughly the same time.
I rarely meet anyone who knows the place I’m from, never mind grew up there, so the coincidence floored me. I typed in my old postcode and dragged the cursor down the lane until it landed in front of the house. I could still see a garden ornament that we had left there and the garage my dad had built for himself.
To go back to our old homes and walk around them again is a fantasy I’m sure many of us have harboured. Childhood homes seem to have a particular pull, at least for those of us lucky to have had a childhood happy enough to want to revisit. It was revealed last week that JK Rowling has lived out that fantasy, secretly buying, for around £400,000, her childhood home in the village of Tutshill in Gloucestershire, the place where she lived between the ages of nine and 18, a house that is said to have inspired elements of the Harry Potter stories. It still has “Joanne Rowling slept here circa 1982” written on a bedroom wall.
As an adult, I have lived in so many rented flats in London that it has warped the concept of home into a series of moving boxes you daren’t get rid of, and pictures you daren’t put on the wall, and the idea of being nostalgic about any one of those impermanent residences feels alien to me. I once thought about re-renting the same flat I had moved out of years before, because I remembered it happily, but when I went to see it again, it was smaller, darker and a lot more expensive and they offered to charge me extra for a bookcase that I had left behind. There’s a lesson there about looking back.
But childhood homes are different and news of Rowling’s purchase gave me a pang. I am wary of nostalgia at the best of times, but you’d be hard pushed to call these the best of times and it did not seem like a coincidence that I found myself looking at my own old house on the internet at a time when many of us, certain MPs aside, are unable to visit our families in real life.
Esther Perel: wise words for couples in lockdown
At the moment, watching films and TV shows can be an oddly wearying exercise in reminding yourself that touching your own face and touching other people used to be a common occurrence and that one day will be again, without provoking so much as a small, involuntary flinch at the sight of an errant eye rub. I’m finding that audiobooks are much safer, as are podcasts, and there is one podcast in particular that has adapted to this new era rather well.
Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel has always been a must-listen. For the uninitiated or those less nosy than I am, Perel is a Belgian psychotherapist who records and releases audio of couples’ counselling sessions. The people involved have given their consent and key details are excluded so as not to identify them. Every episode is utterly fascinating. Perel listens to each person’s issues, whether enormous or seemingly small, and then, with absolute and amazing precision, homes in on the key emotional points that need to be addressed.
Perel has shifted the focus of the podcast to release Couples Under Lockdown episodes. If people were struggling with their relationships before, the lockdown is bringing them to desperation. The first episode features a midwife working double shifts in Italy, so you can only imagine the strain that couple are under. In addressing their problems, Perel is calm, reasonable and insightful and her counselling by proxy is a balm. If only she could be brought into every living room for the next row about – and I’m just plucking this out of thin air – why a partner finds it impossible to wash up teaspoons, just teaspoons, even when they’re washing up everything else. Where should we begin, indeed?
Pharrell still knows how to make us Happy
A list of the 40 most-played songs of the last decade has been released, compiled by music licensing company PPL and Radio 2.
Whether this decade will have the numbers to compare it to depends on whether people will again be able to listen to music while actually going somewhere. Streaming numbers are down, because it’s not as much fun to listen to music on headphones and stare out of the window of the flat as it is to listen to music on headphones and stare out of the window of a moving bus, which is just one of the surprisingly small experiences for which I have started to pine.
Anyway. The 2010s were years that seemed a little rocky at the time, although it turns out they were saving the big spectacle for the after-party. Last decade, we loved Maroon 5’s Moves Like Jagger, which came in at number three, and Adele’s Rolling in the Deep, which came in at number two. But the most-played song of the 2010s turns out to have been Pharrell’s carefree 2013 smash, Happy. I am not of a religious persuasion but sometimes God’s big cosmic joke truly settles for the easy punchline.
• Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist
