Last weekend I was sitting on a coach on the way to a party with a friend. We had committed ourselves to a good hour's drive through rain so heavy that anybody called Noah was beginning to check on their stock of two-by-four planks. At the end of this journey was a barbecue. Hah.
To distract myself from the rather tedious realisation that my pursuit of a good party was leading me to do things nothing short of irrational, I decided to attempt a good nose-around in somebody else's past. So I started laying into my friend with a string of questions about his family, youth, household pets, cupboard-residing skeletons, and so on.
It didn't yield anything very scandalous - and, in fact, the party turned out to be more than worth the effort - but the conversation kept us amused for nearly the entire journey because we got onto a subject close to my heart: nostalgia. It happened as we were just breaking out of the suburbs and I put a question to him about where he had spent those formative preadolescent years. Near Marley Park it turned out, "but then, it was all fields like this around there then, endless scope for amusement". "Ah yes, I remember that," I said. "It was lovely and wild - not like now." When we finally realised what had happened, it was like a moment from a film - the coach fell into a pothole, so we were quite literally jolted into an awareness that, ohmygod, we sounded just like our parents. Back when I was a sprat, no trip through the low graffiti-ed suburbs of Dublin was complete without either of my parents bringing up the fact that around here used to be fields or the site of a dairy or the workshop where they invented the wheel. Of course, myself and my sister would take it all with the pinch of salt it deserved - looking at the roundabouts, rows of houses and petrol stations, it was blindingly obvious to us that my parents were lying through their teeth. There was no way any of this was ever fields, but - like the tall tales about Cliff Richard being considered sexy and my parents having a life before we came along - it was a falsehood that seemed to make them happy, so we let them away with it. But suddenly, here I was at the age of 26 wallowing in the same bathetic longing as my folks.
Of course, I always presumed that the nostalgia thing would happen eventually - I am not one of those people who want to stay young forever, as the thought of having to wear uncomfortable shoes and be always moody is a terrible one. I am actually rather looking forward to the time when I can hang out in the Scholls shop and have personality traits rather than phases. I just thought it wouldn't happen while I was in my mid-20s. It seemed like the mental equivalent of the premature menopause - overcome with hot flushes of nostalgia when I should be moist with desire for the contemporary and the new. I realised that one of the only things that had got me really roused in the last month was the fact that they had converted my local from a lovely grotty old man's pub to somewhere with hardwood floors, a disco ball and a DJ. Somewhere, in other words, that was catering for people my age.
Other hot topics of conversation during the week included They Don't Make Guinness Ads Like They Used To; It's All Very Well Turning McGonagles Niteclub Into Somewhere Called The System But A Hotel - Now That's A Bit Much; and It Was Always Sunny In Brittas Bay Back Then. But the more I think about it, the more I realise that I am not the only one - that, in fact, my whole generation is obsessed with the past.
To give us our due, I do think there is probably a very good reason for this. While change is a constant, it has just been so darned fast of late. A craze for Rubik cubes, Cabbage Patch Kids, Lo-Lo balls or spinners used to last for ages; now your Tamagotchi, Beanie Baby or Furbie is no sooner in the shops than it's terribly old-hat. Similarly with drinks or slang or clubs or shoes or types of music - once a certain combination of noises, sounds and beats is given the label of garage or jungle or sandwich or something, it immediately becomes terribly last Tuesday and something new has taken its place on the cutting edge.
We are a generation which has been deprived of the possibility of getting attached to anything, as no sooner has something arrived than it has disappeared. I read novels about thoughtful characters who have terrible angst about the dull monotony of their surroundings, the village shop that has never sold anything but snuff and Fry's Chocolate Creme, or the laundrette with the twitching curtains; but the shop units downstairs from me have already housed a curtain shop, a diner, a baker's and a clothes shop, and I've only lived there two and a half years.
So is it any wonder that we have begun to get rather petulant about things we have grown up with being turned into things we know we won't grow old with? Our conformity is not so much a love of the status quo as a desperate hankering after a quo that will stay static long enough for us to rebel against it.