Training | 2010.02.14
A martyr to nostomania | David McKie
Whenever I go back to Leeds, a desire to return to old haunts dooms me to disappointment
In Three Men in a Boat , by Jerome K Jerome, the narrator recalls how while afflicted with hay fever, or something similar, he consulted a book and became convinced he was suffering from every ailment recorded there – right through to the final entry, zymosis – with the sole exception of housemaid\'s knee. As a hypochondriac, he would have been even more troubled today, since he would turn to the internet, which has riches in this department far exceeding the contents of any medical dictionary, including several dozen malaises unheard of in Jerome\'s day. The moral is clear: steer well away from any such reading.
Yet even then you\'re not safe. There is always a danger that while riffling through a standard dictionary you will come across conditions unlisted in medical books which nevertheless seem familiar. Do I spend more and more of my mornings in a hypnopompic state? Do I sometimes drift, however inadvertently, into ideopraxism ? Then there is mulierosity, a term that seems to have disappeared from dictionaries now, but was once defined, I think, as an undue fondness for the company of women. But recently I found in the pages of Chambers, lurking somewhere down the trail from nosh to nostril, a word that described a condition I knew with a pang of recognition had me clutched in its grip. That word was nostomania: an abnormal desire to go back to familiar places.
For a moment I thought: there is surely a halfway house. Just as dictionaries distinguish between a bibliophile, a lover or collector of books, and a bibliomaniac, one with a mania for collecting or possessing them, there would surely be, listed close to nostomania, a condition called nostophilia, defined as a perfectly normal desire to return to familiar places. But there was none. And on further reflection, that seems entirely justified.
This passion for revisiting former haunts can hardly be rational, when so many that one revisits are not what they used to be. You will often be safe enough with seaside and countryside. You can wander though autumnal woods in Surrey, the leaves plashing under your feet, or drive the open roads of North Yorkshire, or find your way back to a Pembrokeshire beach feeling pretty sure they won\'t let you down. Small towns, too, are fairly secure; I don\'t expect to taste disappointment if I return to Louth, Beverley or Devizes.
But if you are drawn to big towns or cities, beware. It is prudent to disembark with at least a mild feeling of dread. When I take the train back to Leeds, my adoptive home town, I peer obsessively out of the window to catch sight of two cherished places: the Elland Road football ground, and my favourite building anywhere, Leeds town hall.
The town hall, glimpsed for a moment between buildings that I think must have crowded in on it over the past two decades, looks much as it always did, though cleaner (nostomaniacs of the time denounced the decision to clean it, preferring it sooty, as it had been all their lives). But Elland Road, for all the recent sufferings of the club and its slot in the old third division, is a drastically grander place than it was when I first went there, long before Don Revie arrived and everything changed.
And the centre of Leeds, now so cosmopolitan, so teeming with money, suggests for much of the time a quite different city – not really in any true sense a familiar place any more. Naked nymphs still adorn the City Square, but the fine old post office is no longer a post office, while favourite spots like the headquarters of Yorkshire Conservative Newspapers , with its enticing pictures of recent sporting events in the windows, or the music shop in whose basement one was sometimes flush enough to spend five and ninepence (29p) on a record, long ago disappeared.
The worst moment, though, is always arrival in Briggate, long the city\'s principal shopping street, where the trams clanged down from Lewis\'s store and the Odeon cinema past Matthias Robinson\'s department store, across Boar Lane and down under the railway bridge into areas to the south that somehow seemed foreign. It\'s not only the trams that have gone: it\'s much of the world to which they belonged. Perhaps we nostomaniacs are doomed by constant disappointment to modulate over time into a condition defined in the very next entry in Chambers. Nostopathy – an abnormal fear of going back to familiar places.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]nostomania-leeds-desire-return
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