Nostalgia Problems

Do you know what's really good? EA's 1999 snowmobile racing game, Sled Storm. This is a cracking game. It's one of those games that sits in my memory, fuzzily and comfortingly, as part of the backdrop to my childhood: something that was just around, available, like the intermittent beeping of a Giga Pet. Or Changing Rooms. You know? It was just there, and I couldn't imagine there would be a point in my life in which it would not be there, in which I couldn't just pick up a controller and race around in the snow, in the same way I couldn't imagine an age in which the opinions of Lawrence Llwellyn-Bowen were no longer relevant.

I've been playing it recently, after a many (many) year break. And to review it, briefly: it's still great. And it looks way better than I thought it would.

Recently my son got glasses for the first time, having sadly inherited the beginnings of myopia from me. He put them on, and he literally couldn't believe it. It was slightly heartbreaking, the way he kept pointing to things and saying 'I can see that!'. He had no frame of reference for how things should look. He just thought everything being blurry was the norm.

Anyway, usually I find dipping back into the PS1 era to be like that 'new glasses' moment, but in reverse. 'I used to think these graphics were amazing!' I say, to my kids, or just to myself if they're not listening. How did I ever see anything? No wonder my eyes are so crap. But Sled Storm holds up pretty well.

I don't have much else to say about it. It's a snowmobile racing game. It has a decent soundtrack and it feels fantastic to play. It has a bunch of hidden routes you can find. It's fun! I like games that are just fun. I can't hurtle myself down a mountain in real life, but I can using Sled Storm.

I finished playing it and I thought, hmm, I might buy this. Like a physical copy. To own. On a PlayStation that I never use. I found a copy on eBay for £18. Not bad! I thought. (This is probably more than my Dad would have paid for it originally - he bought everything second-hand, and we had a strict price cut-off.)

And then I came to my senses. I am job hunting at the moment. I am trying to build our emergency savings fund. I am trying not to buy stuff just for the sake of it. Reluctantly, I removed it from my Watch List. Maybe another time.

I've been working on a short story based on this item:

I received this for my birthday in 1997. I loved this thing. It made me feel very important, you know? I could store all of my secret thoughts in it, while at the same time enjoying the company of a needy virtual pet. During the initial writing of the short story (quite a long time ago now), I looked it up on eBay. I found one for £44.56 (or best offer). It's still on there now.

And for some reason I want this so badly. I use the excuse of needing it for my short story - how am I meant to write about it if I don't have it in my hands? - but really I just want the familiarity of it. I want to hold it, I want to write a diary entry using the annoying little buttons, I want to hear all the noises again. It's nonsensical, especially given my job situation, but there is a part of my brain that insists this little green plastic thing will fix all of my problems and make me happy.

It's silly. I know it is. If I had a spare £44.56 I would probably spend it on therapy. But that's not as fun, is it? Yes, it might help to fix my brain, but it wouldn't give me a happy little buzz. If anything it would probably do the opposite.

This isn't the stupidest thing I've almost bought from eBay. Over the years, nostalgia has driven me to bookmark all sorts of things, including but not limited to:

• Various editions of the UK version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer magazine
• A Spice Girls movie keyring
• The Simpsons guidebooks
• A tie-die Beanie Baby bat named Batty (yes, that's right, I am the sole person in the world who might be slightly interested in buying Beanie Babies in the modern age)

In my low moments, I am a nostalgia monster. I don't just want to remember things. I want to own them. I want them to live in my house. I want to gather them in a mildly creepy way. Mostly, I capitulate to my grown-up tendencies and forget about them.

(Usually.)

But by far the stupidest thing I've almost bought while scrolling mindlessly on my phone in the bath (prime impulse-buying spot) is this:

Megan, you might be thinking, this is a book based on the '90s British television show Changing Rooms. Why would you want this? And that is a valid question. But let me tell you, my family bloody loved Changing Rooms. Nothing would stop us from watching families destroy each other's homes with terracotta ornaments, wallpaper borders, and throw cushions. Of course, we watched it in the faint hope of a disaster. Who didn't? But mostly, we watched it for inspiration.

My Mum was (and is) the kind of person who gets bored of a room approximately one minute after she's finished redecorating it. My childhood home was a kaleidoscope of colours and styles and trends: I remember lots of talk about laminate flooring, I remember Mum standing behind a fold-out table covered in wallpaper paste, I remember many agonisingly long trips to B&Q. Changing Rooms was her style guide, her muse.

Anyway, one time I was hanging out with my friend Ruth and she spotted me flicking through her copy of the Changing Rooms book. Who even knew there was an accompanying book? Not me.

'Oh, you can have that if you want,' she said.

'Are you sure?'

'Yeah, I never read it anyway.'

I pored over this thing. There were some mad rooms in there. Bright, sunshine-yellow kitchens. Velvet-covered boudoirs. '90s decor trends were particularly appealing to children, too (except the boudoir thing). Why not have each room in your home a different primary colour? Who's going to stop you, the fun police? At the time, I was starting to design homes in The Sims, so this was an excellent reference point. All of my homes were bright, happy places.

Once, in the bath as a grown woman with a fully developed brain, I remembered the existence of this book. I came so close to buying a second-hand copy. And then I had a clear thought:

What on earth am I doing?

And I stopped myself. Nobody needs this book. No-one.

I know I'm probably preaching to the choir here. I'm acquainted with a lot of retro collectors. There's something really lovely about taking a little piece of your childhood and being able to still see it. To be able to smell it and hold it and own it. The physicality, it's important. The touch. I don't just want to play The Lion King on an emulator, I want that big box in my hands. Arrested development? A yearning or a time when you had no worries? Or just natural inclinations? I'm not sure.

The truth is that adulthood can feel a bit like a long, drawn-out process of losing yourself. You start off as a new adult with all these ideas. You're young and vibrant and buzzing with potential. You're going to change stuff. And then you go out into adult life and it's actually way harder than you thought. There's joy, of course there's joy, there's a stupid amount of it. But there's also quite a lot of grind. A lot of worries and sleepless nights. Suddenly you have all these tasks and responsibilities. And that album you thought you'd record or the book you thought you'd write or the film you thought you'd make gets shoved to one side. And maybe at some point you do something to reinvigorate those dreams: you buy a new camera, you write down some ideas, you pick up a second-hand guitar. But it gathers dust. Because life is tiring, and you don't have time to play anymore.

I watched a comedian recently (and I'm sorry but I can't remember which one) talking about their work, and they suggested that a lot of what we make, as adults, is just building on something we've seen or experienced as a child. This has made me think. During my social media hiatus, I started asking myself big questions. I'm trying to drill into the core of who I am, what my values are, and what I stand for, after coming close to losing myself completely last year. And one of the things I stand for is this: I have to make stuff. I have to write, I have to have weird little craft projects, my mind has to have somewhere creative to go. It doesn't necessarily have to be my job, but I do have to have something to work on. I have allowed adult life to bury that need. But it never went anywhere. It just bubbled under the surface, giving me this perpetual feeling of dissatisfaction that I couldn't pin down. I didn't feel like me, but I couldn't work out why.

So my aim this year is to make more things. Because it doesn't actually have to be this way. You can make stuff, you know? You can decide not to put the washing away, and instead, you can make stuff. Who's going to stop you? The grown-up police? (I swear I'm going to stop this now.) You can make time for these things. Becoming an adult doesn't have to be a slow process of losing yourself. It can be a slow process of finding yourself, instead. And yeah you'll probably shed a few ideas here and there and you might take a few wrong turns, but a lot of that core stuff that you built up in childhood and as a teenager is still in you. You don't have to become Old Dry Keith (unless you want to). You can be you, with all your passions intact, but with a few, you know, realistic adjustments. With more wisdom and patience and a small, useful amount of cynicism. Working on that is probably more useful than buying old books and keyrings, anyway, at least in my case, given that I'm skint.

I mean, it's not an either-or thing. One day I'd like to be able to find creative fulfilment and buy all the tat from my youth. But right now, the former feels more important than the latter. I know what I'm looking for, and I'm probably not going to find it by hoarding '90s memorabilia, burying myself in semi-transparent plastic objects like a modern-day Smaug.

(But I still might buy that Giga Pet thing, you know. Eventually.)