WHEN I was a schoolgirl, like most little Italians, I returned every summer to my parents' homeland. But I was always fascinated by my friend's accounts of Millport. Without surrendering my love affair with Italy I wished I could go there as well, not that I would have dared admit to this half-formed envy. And for years I have not thought of the place until listening this week to Bill Paterson's return journey in Places of the Mind (Radio Scotland).
You can feel nostalgia for a place you have never specifically been; in fact, good literature is always revealing that emotional paradox to us. A fifties world from a television series, he said, shades of Blyton, rewritten Glasgow-style. Hot pea suppers instead of cucumber sandwiches. Two cars on the island (one was the doctor's), a hired bicycle, the Ritz cafe playing Buddy Holly on the juke box, working the boats (for the more butch lads), and long fab idyllic Augusts for everyone.
Of course it was more than a brilliant evocation of place - it was a sharply detailed replay of what being young was like. Paterson in his Airtex tennis shirt (''a bourgeois thing to do'') and his mate, musician David McNiven, in his velvet flares. And unlike our more worried protective times, freedom from mum and dad from morning till night. The memory of the rock pools teeming with wildlife - that memory was not a product of ''brain-rotting nostalgia-dementia'' as he'd suspected. Recalling its wonders to Jonathan Miller he got his corroboration. That glorious marine habitat in the fifties warmed by the Gulf Stream, before the ravages of pollution, was no distortion of hindsight. Ecologically, they really were ''the last days of Eden''.
Oh, and he did establish one important advantage of Millport over Arran. Describing the views from the island, he pointed out the unarguable truth that you cannot see Arran from Arran. A pleasure to hear one of our finest actors being so insightful and so endearingly, well, daft.
I have a more recent memory of sitting on the tube reading a column by Ruth Picardie in the Observer. I was enjoying the details - a social worker with 2in-long nails who couldn't spell was checking whether Picardie qualified for a free domestic cleaner. It was funny and then the truth sunk in that the writer was dying; a young woman in her early thirties with twin babies. An aggressive cancer was roaring through her, and she was telling us how it was. Before I say Goodbye, broadcast every morning this week on Radio 4, included the five Observer columns, her e-mails and, in the final programme, a contribution from her husband Matt Seaton.
The gross insult to her vanity - she described her moon face bloated with steroids - she countered brilliantly. Not with an other worldly superiority to such frivolous concerns now she faced death, but with a sunny bloody-minded defiance. She loved facials and the frizz serum that sorted out her curls. She wrote about tactile sensual delights and treats; and she wrote to her children Joe and Lola of their own beauty.
It was unbearably sad, brave, and honest but most of all specific. You've got the brand name of the hair serum, the details of Lola's passions (ladybirds, the colour blue, clothes), the wisteria in the garden her husband always forgot to water. Right through these broadcasts came the reminder that the glorious and the ordinary are really the same thing and her triumph came from bearing witness to losing both, square on.
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