The museum of nostalgia, and the shrine to the patron saint of longing.

Those big beautiful beaky bastards

Welcome to the Museum of nostalgia. How did you find your way here? Was it the smell of cut grass? An old Levellers song? A bird called you? Oh, that bird, of course it was! That bird that leads so many people here. At the end of the museum, before the gift shop and the restaurant, you’ll find a shrine to him.

We got rid of the old welcome desk and put a greenhouse in its place. Get inside and warm up, smell all those tomato leaves. Your gran is just outside, with her trousers pulled up far too high, pointing the hose pipe at the peas. You can follow her down past the chives and the mint, past the pond (this seems like an inordinate amount of insects, but our historians assure us there really were this many), and into the house.

You may have one bite of Edam and a single sniff of the Leather Imperial soap before you leave. Get into the little red Yugo outside, but please make sure you’ve not got any trace of the soap on you, since the smell of pure comfort to you is the smell of an “I’ll wash your mouth out” threat to your mum.

If you turn Graceland up, this car will take you to Devon and Golden Virginia, sleeping bags, lane blackberries, moor gorse, heather, and horse shit. Put Love at the Five & Dime¹ on instead you can go home to Walliswood.

Once you step out of the car, follow the smell of Nag champa and cheap hash first, then the sound of the Grange Hill theme song circa 1995. It’ll take you to a room with peeling pink paisley wallpaper, a crackling fire in the fireplace, and a pea-green sofa. There’s a burnt fish finger sandwich, some cubes of cheddar, and a sliced up apple all sitting on a plate resting precariously on the arm of the sofa.

This memory was an ordinary pebble once, but time has weathered it to perfection, so that it feels smooth and warm and good to hold in your hand for a little while.

That being said, do tread carefully on the way out, since our architect thought it would be hilarious to put a trapdoor in the floor in here, and nobody is sure where it is exactly, or where it leads.

In the next room there’s a set of swings and a rusty old slide in a late summer evening playing field. Bats are flying around you (probably pipistrelle), the scent of hay is on the breeze, and you’re all worn out from biking down hills and playing Bundle. The best key for that door is a proper haybale, but if you can’t find one of those around you can sometimes jimmy the lock with this matchbox stuffed full of dried Meadowsweet and Sweet vernal grass.

If you leap off the swing and run, you can push your way through a privet hedge and climb up the ladder towards our planetarium. It’s just the corrugated tin roof of a shed, but you can see meteors streaking across a clear August night from here. Jason’s next to you, his face is a blur besides the freckles, but he still has both his thumbs.

Sit up and you can see into the kitchen of your countryside council house, with its orange walls and the silver stars spray-painted all over the door. If Jason would shut up for a second you might even hear the Levellers song too. Your mum’s standing at the kitchen sink and she can’t be more than 33. This might not look that young from the roof, but every time you visit the museum 33 gets younger and younger.

You can’t reach the roundabout and the fireball with Adam anymore, it’s deep inside a memory nesting doll where you can remember remembering remembering it, and you know it felt good and there was maybe a BIC lighter in Adam’s hand, but that’s all you can get.

You can, however, jump from the shed roof to the roof of Sophie’s rental car that night she drove most of the way up Mount Baldy so you could watch the Perseids together.

If you want to get from sitting on the roof to sitting in the passenger seat, you just need to press play on that car stereo sitting on the pedestal.

A lot of these songs go to fast food drive-throughs.

Goin’ back to Cali will take you to Fatburger, which can also take you to laying flowers outside the Petersen automotive museum in March with Brooke and Sophie.

Blinded by the light lands you in a Del Taco parking lot. No, the curator has no shame about putting a Del Taco parking lot in the Museum², because Sophie was there and you were giddy and laughing, and the smoggy sunset made the light perfect.

Cover me up puts you in an In’n’out on the way back from Joshua Tree, but if you stick around here too long Dennis will waft in like a bad smell and tell you you’re doing that thing that annoys him again, “you know, where you look like you’re enjoying your food too much”.

There’s a First Aid box on the wall, and inside it you’ll find two antidotes in case this happens. The first is that you can try shouting “Fuck off Dennis” very loudly, and eating his burger too. This is a fun trick, wandering back into a memory and changing it, but it doesn’t always work.

The easier medicine is you and Sophie crying in Little Fork/Flore/anywhere because the food was so good, talking afterwards about all the ways joy spills out when it gets too big for your bodies.

Please come into the Odorifics room. These are on loan from Maude in 1971, her and Harold insisted that we keep Snowfall on 42nd street in rotation, but you’d be surprised at how much of someone else’s memories you can sniff. Pull the mask over your nose.

Here’s one just for you; warm desert air, mesquite smoke, tequila, grapefruit juice, Sophie’s Tobacco 1812, your off-brand Tobacco Vanille, melted cheese, salsa, a touch of creosote bush, a pinch more tequila. You’re just outside Pappy and Harriets, but we’ve amalgamated a whole bunch of moments together from various years to make your chest ache.

Inhale one more time. We’ve added in a few extra notes, so you can slow dance with the Victorville boy near the bar for a minute or two (if you can manage to put your arms around a memory), but it’s going to evaporate faster than a Jo Malone perfume.

There’s another moment, adjacent to this, in the odorific; the smell of October rain on hot Inglewood concrete. You’re dressed as Joan of Arc, the rain has soaked your cardboard flames and drenched your dress, and the Victorville boy is saying that line that Angela dreams of hearing in My So Called Life.

We used to employ a rather controversial anthropologist. She could take just two or three artefacts and weave a whole story about the Utopian civilisation they probably belonged to. In fact, the less she had to work with, the more she excelled at this.

This was just a fun crush, making a whole constellation out of a few glittering bits, but you’ll see why she quit when we get to the Tunnel of old loves. It’s on the third floor, just past the photo gallery.

The display cabinet at the entrance of the gallery contains your housefire heart necklace. It still has the char marks, but it doesn’t smell so smoky anymore.

If you’re bringing anyone to the photo gallery, you might want to consider putting a cloth over the cabinet, since that moment belongs in a more sombre place for some of your friends. You’ll be held up here explaining it for a while, otherwise. Maybe it’s because you were only subletting by then. Maybe it’s because gathering around a fire with your friends always makes you feel good, no matter the circumstances. Maybe it’s because you secretly think places should be preserved (in smoke) the second you stop making memories in them, put them in the museum before they change too much.

Also forever preserved in the smoke are the best bra you ever owned, the ruby slippers Zoniel bought you, and the few things of your dad’s that didn’t have paint thrown over them the night he was killed.

The necklace takes you to the moment you saw all the fire engines in the street, but it also takes you back to living in the bedsit with Emelie a couple of years before, on the first floor, right above all the noise from the pub. The murmur of the adults in another room, while you’re 5 and 11 and 14 and 20 years old all at once somehow.

We apologise for the stench of Strongbow and Red Stripe in the gallery, but our cleaner is on holiday. Okay, that’s a lie, our cleaner still hasn’t worked out how to deal with spillages. Just avoid the areas around those little yellow SafeStep signs and you’ll probably be fine.

There are only photos from the years 2003 through to 2007 here, a handful are polaroids, but all of the rest are courtesy of Gregory Nolan. Thank god for Gregory Nolan, since our resident archivist kept slipping on those spillages and blacking out during this period.

Some of these photographs have replaced actual memories over time, some you can’t distinguish between the memory and the memory of the photograph, and some you’ve inserted yourself into the background though you almost definitely weren’t there that night at all.

There are two photos that’ll make you yearn more than the rest.

The first is of an ugly leather sofa in Nambucca, there’s a square of sunlight falling on it and it’s got that golden hue that all the best memories have³. The sofa is empty so you can put anyone on it you want, put everyone on it all at once, bring the dead back with this sofa (we can do that here). You can sprawl across it and let the hot leather warm your skin, have Harpoon singing his Cohen cover in the background. You can leave it empty while you sleep in the room above.

The other photo is over by the exit, it’s Emelie in bed in the room where you once woke up with a mouse on your head. Before you moved in with Jonny you took a photo from your bed looking across to her and she from hers looking across to you because you knew they’d be needed for a museum some day.

This is the place preserved in smoke, the one that will make you more nostalgic than anywhere else for the rest of time, a place with a dead pigeon in the water tank and some piss in the sink. A place that only cost you £35 a week.

If you look at this for long enough you can hear Happy as Annie, or the South Park theme song, and you can smell Crystal kebab’s lahmacun and a can of Rubicon guanabana.

If you look at this for long enough you can be in the room and on every inch of Holloway Road simultaneously.

If you look at this for long enough, George is in the room too (though you’ve never called him that, not once) and your head is on his chest and you can smell his Joop!

The Joop! gives you a love rush so strong that it’s inevitable you tumble into the tunnel, roly-poly right into it. Get back up please, we’ve banned all genuflection in the tunnel. You may want to put some shoes on too, lest you get the communion crumbs all over your feet.

Here is the monster truck monstrance, a reliquary containing a ticket stub from the January 2012 Monster Jam. The ticket grants you access to the Qualcomm stadium, where we have assembled a small display of perfect moments with Mark. There’s the faint sound of The Great Pumpkin Waltz before the show starts, but the roar of the engines will drown it out any second. Why not sit back, eat your complementary corn dog, and enjoy the spectacle.

Look! There you are in a bath with a bottle of red wine and him sitting on the floor reading to you about McSorleys and Old Mr Flood. There you are slow dancing inside a haunted ship. There you are again, hitchhiking back from the Île de Ré.

El Toro Loco is backing up, it’s going to attempt to jump the bathtub, boat, and car all in one. Oh my god! It hasn’t made it all the way across, it’s come down just after the boat and the French car is crushed under the weight of it, but isn’t that satisfying to watch? Doesn’t that crunch of metal sound good? Isn’t this exactly what your nervous system was wired to enjoy?

The driver has stepped out now, he’s making a beautiful speech taking sole responsibility for the smoking wreckage, the pressure to make the jump was just too much. He’s talking about the shrine he’s going to put in his own museum. It’s a perfect speech, but the crowd aren’t having it, they bought tickets for a carnival of carnage and they just want the show to go on. Some are booing, some are even throwing vegetables, there goes a whole tomato plant whizzing past your ear.

Over there is James’ first (audible) fart in front of you, in a test tube just like Edison’s final breath. There’s a vial of his post-run sweat too. We don’t have time for that bit right now, and it feels cruel displaying the excretions and expulsions of a stopped body. At least someone has covered the maze of mirrors behind it in cloth, we didn’t want you to get sidetracked by some kind of Charlie Chaplin chase scene.

Step right up, here we have a first-class reliquary, the cracked tooth of a sad-eyed clown saint. There’s a Super-8 film of you and Ted eating dinner and drinking cider in The Flask after your date at Highgate cemetery. It’s just a small moment, between the starters and mains, where he coyly slides this little ball of crumpled wrapping paper across the table. Inside is the molar he’d had extracted the week before, with a little dried blood on the socket still.

This isn’t totally out of the blue. He knew you’d become obsessed with Jesus’ baby teeth, he knew you were struggling to make teeth for your papier-mâché reliquaries, but still it felt like a declaration of some kind.

Was it before or after this that someone told you that men’s hearts are like wild animals and you have to stay really still and let them come to you? Therapists hate this one simple trick! That didn’t sound like much fun. You wanted to be a hunter and have everyone praise your great skill with the bow and arrow. “She strikes again, a thousand miles away and the arrow pierced right through his heart!”

Press the rewind button and play the reel again. It’s Tom and Jerry rather than Artemis or Diana.

Try to stay still for a moment at least, just savour this little bit where the razzle-dazzle anthropologist came in and was certain that this was a love token, that one day Ted would be a toothless old man, and you’d be an old woman wearing a necklace of his teeth. Adorned in his adoration, the great huntress’ trophies jingle-jangling away into the night.

The walls in this museum are paper-thin. Avoid getting too close to that one over there, in the room on the other side there’s an angry little commentator doing some kind of post-match analysis. “why did she have to send his cat fan-mail?”, “what kind of moron points out the grave of an old lover on a date and suggests that the men in her life might be cursed?”, “it is very unsexy to feed someone tinned pease pudding for breakfast” “there is no trick to getting anyone to step inside an avalanche”.

Yes, we know the architect was a dickhead to design it like this. We’ve checked, and you did sign a waiver before you entered though.

The last item in here is a sea snail shell. Put the lip up to your ear and see what you can hear. Larrikin Love, Slick Rick, The Waterboys. These are all fine choices, but they’ll only take you as far as west London.

If you wait a little while, Peace of Iona will fade to nothing and you’ll hear Jonny singing the chorus to Bob Dylan’s Sara. Press your ear real hard against the conch, you can just about make your own voice out, “Did you make that up? About me?”, then both of you laughing. Then the waves.

This was the oldest reliquary in the tunnel, and the memory in it has got all tangled up with other ones, and with the lyrics to Sara. There’s one bit in focus, you and Jonny in the water and your chest feeling like it’s going to explode from happiness. This is the apex on the line graph of your relationship (side note - all the staff here are glad you’ve stopped literally drawing those out).

The rest of it’s like trying to watch a film through a pair of sea glass spectacles. Can you make out the shape of the River Thames Whales resurrected in this West Wittering water? This whale was woven into the story of your courtship, so it makes sense that it’d be swimming about in the murk, but why is there an old man in here too? Oh, it’s Bob Dylan. He’s left the dune he was lying on and is swimming towards you now, yelling out the other word for nostalgia.

You can outswim him, do the breast-stroke past all the folk-heroes in the seaweed and get to the shore, where this mixed-up memory ends.

Once you step out of the water you’ll see a glowing phone box.

This is it, our shrine to the great siren saint who’s been luring so many visitors to the museum for years. There are hundreds of quotes and passages scratched into the glass, from all the people who visited this booth⁴ before you.

Hearing his voice, a god who had made the curlew would almost instantly want to remake himself as the thing he had made - Moriarty

And alone in the night's eternal, curving act
They yearn with tongues of curlews - D. THOMAS WAS HERE 1949.

Just above the phone itself, blu-tacked to the wall, is your own contribution. A felted and embroidered memory, an offering to the patron saint of all yearning and nostalgia.

Wet felted, needle felted, and embroidered. Some of the wool was dyed with mushrooms and flowers.

Cradle the receiver, and listen. Yeats slammed this down one time⁵, but he came back and left an apology. It was written in invisible ink and stuffed inside a plain brown envelope with diagrams and symbols on one side and Paudeen scribbled on the other.

Shhh, stop listening to the interference on the line and focus. There’s the call that made you cry the first time you heard it, like you’d inherited some memory it was already nesting inside. Now you can step inside the scene.

Langamull in June. It’s past ten pm but the sun still hasn’t fully sunk below the horizon. It’s just you and your mum, the beach is deserted except for some sheep. Your skin is sun-warm and your hair is sea-wet, and even before the bird you already know this will get a whole room in the museum one day. Walk past the thrift and sedum, over the creeping thyme and eyebright, and stop for a second by this lichen-splattered stone wall.

Now that you’re learning how to stay very still, you can stand here for a while and listen to the curlew cry again.

1. Sometimes this song will take you to Dorking Woolworths instead, with your grubby little fingers in the pick and mix sweets. If this happens, get back in the car and put on Shoehorn with teeth instead. We would suggest Michelle Shocked’s Anchorage but our curator has searched high and low for this without luck.

2. But maybe a little about not calling it a car park.

3. Like the Richard Gere/town called Riddle scenes in I’m not there.

4. A one stop Whaup shop

5. The curlew call was his own personal Joop!