The heady whiff of nostalgia

In the past two days, I've suddenly been caught up in a whirl of emails from old friends from my time as an architecture student in Newcastle. Some of us haven't seen each other for 15 years, but enough of us still know one or two others that it becomes a bit like 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon - we each know someone who has contact details for people we considered to be long-lost. Now there's talk of a reunion, and I'm getting quite excited by the idea.

The odd thing is, I seem to have been already indulging in nostalgic thoughts for a few weeks. It probably started with tidying the attic and finding stashes of old photographs. The slightly demoralising thing about this was that, for a long time, I considered myself to be a serious photographer, so everywhere I went I took lots of artfully composed pictures of buildings, streetscapes, landscapes, animals, sunsets, interesting roadsigns....you get the drift; and yet it's the badly-lit, alcohol-laden group snapshots of friends that beckon to be kept and treasured. Just as well Facebook didn't exist back then, otherwise my profile might as well have been called "pictures of places I've been to that you might have been to too."

Nostalgia stepped up a gear last week when I paid a final visit to live music at The Grapes, in Sheffield. My own bands have played there many times and I've lost count of the number of times I've lost count of the number of beers I've drunk there of an evening. Live music at The Grapes has not so much been a victim of progress (it has managed to laugh in the face of progress) but of the mundane - a change in the personal circumstances of the owners. Whatever the reasons, a dark room above a slightly seedy pub has long been the best place to see live bands at their most up-close, their most exposed to the audience, and their most captivating. Absolutely everyone who ever played in a band since the 1980s has played The Grapes, and its passing is a very sad moment.

Then came all this reunion stuff. I've long been suspicious of reunions, seeing them as a dangerous mix of finding out how little you actually had in common with people, and competing with them for how successful you've each been in the interim. However, thanks to the modern age of email, social networking etc, we already know what we've all been up to and, hopefully, we're all content with what we've done and happy for the others. And, much more than that, our explosion of emails is full of instant humour and banter, so the ice will be well and truly destroyed by the time we meet. It probably helps that architecture was one of those very intense courses, where for several years we spent more time with these people than with our families, and now, 15 years later, it's still easy to recall an inflexion in a voice, a shared moment of mirth, midnight oil-burning equally suffered and relished.

But perhaps the strangest piece of this nostalgic interlude has been snow-induced. My local neighbourhood is quite high on a hill, and we are in the grip of the biggest pre-Christmas cold snap for about 30 years. We have 15" (nearly 40cm) of snow here, and it keeps on coming. It's wonderfully picturesque, and when I hear someone complaining that it's "horrendous" because they can't dig their car out, I want to subject them to violence. I want to say, for God's sake, unless you're really ill and need the kind of medical attention that this weather obstructs, or you're genuinely poor and can't heat your home, then this is the exact opposite of horrendous. It's a magical, escapist world, where you can skip work, marvel at the snowflakes, throw missiles at your neighbours with impunity and, in the case of the students who live next door to me, ski to lectures.

Walking along the middle of a main road normally in thrall to the cars and buses, and seeing other people do the same, dragging their shopping home on sledges, laughing, hearing a hubbub of conversations because there's no vehicular traffic to drown it out, noticing how frenetically busy the local shops are when no-one can drive to the supermarkets.....It's amazing: all that has to happen is that water falls out of the sky frozen, instead of liquid, and our world is transformed into a magical, picturesque, and virtually car-free idyll. Suddenly, the principal role of men in society is to dig paths through this frozen water to help out old ladies, and play icy games with children and neighbours.

Before I know it, I'm being nostalgic for a time before our time - a world I never knew, where this kind of sociable, communal behaviour was commonplace; where an ASBO was administered with the back of a hand and horse-drawn vehicles used the warmth of the horseshit to de-ice the roads. I'm actually remembering fondly a past that I never experienced, and which probably didn't happen. A past where literacy and good sanitation were bourgeois fripperies, and Britain was a world power.

All because of a drop in temperature. So that's the answer: supporting local shops and services, driving less, being a good neighbour. It doesn't require swathes of policy and public spending, and partnership delivery initiatives, or whatever they'll be called next week. It just requires a massive snow machine.

See you at the sustainability practitioners' reunion dinner. In Lapland.

AW.