184: James Grindrod

Nostalgia Interviews with Chris Deacy

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.