no need to panic?
when the subject was "on" of "lisburn gone" there was a fair discussion of is it only lisburn people or irish people who look back??

i came across this extract of an article in "townships"by scott russel sanders which may be of interest.


home ground is the place where, since before you had words for such knowledge, you had known the smells, the seasons, the birds and the beasts, the voices, the houses, the way of working, the lay of the land and the quality of light.

you may love the place if you flourished there , or hate the place if you suffered there . But love it or hate it , you cannot shake free.

Even if you move to the opposite ends of the earth , even if you become intimate with new landscapes, you still bear the impression of that first ground

quite profound and explains a lot for me anyhow
good luck tom

Tom
EXCELLENT!

True
Either Brendan Behan or James Joyce once said somethimg similar about people leaving Croke Park after a day at the horse or dog racing.
Quote = if you were a winner on that day you were surounded by well dressed gentlemen accompanied by their beautiful made up lady wives. If you were a loser then you were being pressed, trampled and pushed aside by evil eyed criminals who had floosies with them.
Donald

Donald
I don’t think the message is quite the same, but I get the point.Something like ‘you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’!
Apropos of nothing; I knew, and enjoyed listening to a bit of the blarney from a brother of ‘The Quare Fellow’. Sadly, Brian passed away a few years ago.

Dabbler
I think there is a slight similarity, Sanders believed your memories of a place or thing are determined by how you were ( or think you were ) treated or fared, hence love / hate = flourishing / suffering. Behan ,thinking in more materialistic terms assoiated love / hate with winning or losing.
Sanders and Walter Scott are unified however when he says ,"Love or hate, you cannot shake free"
Scott asks , Breathe there the man with Soul so dead, who never to himself has said? "This is my own, my native Land!" Whose heart has ner within him burned, as home his footsteps they have turned.
Donald

Donald
For those of us who have been away a very long time, and who have had vastly different experiences to those in our past, nostalgia paints a rosy picture. Speaking for myself, I know that the old friends still in existence in the town would have changed beyond recognition, and our mutual interest would be almost entirely built on shared familiarity with bygone places and lifestyle.
We could share an hour or two talking about ‘the old days’, but, unless we also shared aspirations and achievements/failures, I suspect we would quickly tire of each other.