Nostalgia. The sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time. My life at the moment is giving me pause for nostalgic thought but, as in the words of American writer Peter de Vries, "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be."
I am currently filming a big medical drama series in Leeds, my one time alma mater, the first of the two northern universities that I attended during the late 1980s. I assumed that coming back to the birthplace of my spirited independence from North West London toward a peripatetic creative life would reduce me to tears of nostalgic rue.
Leeds was my city of "firsts". First time away from home, first time I met someone who'd never "met a Jew before", first beer, first all-night rave, first awareness of injustice, first acting opportunity. The university's Drama Society saw me fired up and acting alongside such future luminaries as Alistair McGowan, Peter Morgan and Mark Wadlow.
But rather than sit here tucked sensibly in my hotel bed by 10pm, longing for those heady days gone by, I am looking at a rejuvenated city. The Leeds I remember was in the final grips of the bitter miners' strike, constantly raining, dark and under developed. Now it is a shiny metropolis with shopping boulevards and a Victorian Quarter. Its students eat in restaurants (or so I imagine) rather than staging political demonstrations on the streets.
