Like it says on the tin - nostalgia may be a thing of the past but just recently a couple of examples have turned up to remind me just how comforting it can be to look back on `the happiness of a former place or time.`

Just a few days ago I happened to find `Cornish Walking Trails` which is full of glorious walks around that magical county.  And over many years now, we have enjoyed walking most of the Cornish coast path and so seeing the enchanting videos on Cornish Walking Trails YouTube Channel has brought back some very happy memories and I cannot disguise the `sentimental yearning` I have to get back down there and do some more.  

Now, I don`t watch a lot of television - too much of it is either boring or banal - but I do find some refuge with BBC Four and its engaging documentaries.  And just the other evening I watched a repeat of Joanna Trollope`s episode in the series `The Secret Life of Books,` which introduced me not only to Laurie Lee`s `Cider with Rosie,` which I really must read for myself,  but also to some hidden parts of Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds, which I have not had the pleasure of visiting yet.  Something else for my aspiring bucket list, I think. 

Laurie Lee`s book is, of course, full of nostalgia for his childhood in the Slad Valley and it reminded me of my own childhood, in the 1940s and early `50s which was largely spent in a village sandwiched between Southampton Water and the New Forest.  Despite the wartime and the austerity that followed, the surroundings made it an idyllic place to be growing up.   And I still hark back to my teenage years spent here in deepest Kent, when the county was still the Garden of England and when I played my cricket on the local village greens and the sun always seemed to shine, God was in Her heaven and a whole lifetime stretched out before me.

Those were the days, those were the places and my sentimental yearning remains undimmed, as does my longing for the return of summer and my own Cornish walking trails.