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Mountain Goat
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04 May 2020, 4:04 pm

Sometimes for no obvious reason memories are triggered which involve sights, smells ans some sort of atmosphere of past places or scenes.

A few days ago something triggered a shop I used to occasionally call in (Not that often) where not much was for sale but he made a few model railway related electronic based gadgets. Now the buisiness was not in the shop for that long as he didn't have much to sell, but it had a certain atmosphere about it. A certain smell or "Feel" to it that I can't put into words but immediately when something triggered it, I smelt the same smell and I had a flash of the memory of that past experience.
Yet if I think about the place now, I don't have the smell and can't remember what the smell was. I do remember it visually though.

It makes me think what triggered it? I was about a quarter of a mile away from the place when it happened, but I was not thinking about it at the time. Maybe the area has a smell to it and I smelt a waft of that smell which gave me the memory of the place?
Smells... Certain smells do trigger shutdowns to me so maybe I am extra sensitive to smell? But I don't think I am because some peoples noses work better then mine.

There are things that bring back memories to me. A day where there is a lot of rain I think as Hornby weather as it brings a memory of a scene from the 1978 Hornby catalogue which I would love to see again. It is of a boy looking into a shop window while it is pouring with rain and he sees a Hornby trainset (I believe he was pointing at the LMS duchess trainset with the four coaches. Wanted that set as a kid but it was way over my parents budgets! Some lucky kids must have had them!)
But when I see beautiful heavy rainy weather with just the right shade of light it comes to my mind "Hornby weather!"

Other rain around an area with a certain green shade of grass reminds me of the area around a certain castle known as Carreg Cennan in Wales. Other rain reminds me of exciting trips in the car!
I love rain!! !

But how smells or sights or something that triggers something else... I may not know what triggers the first initial past scene... But when it happens, the smells, sights, feel all come back to me for that brief exciting moment as if I was there, and yet I'm not there.

Another issue I have is that change takes a long time to adapt. I can be looking for a place or think that my local town is still like it was many years ago and be dissapointed that it has changed. I can start to go to visit a shop and my Mum reminds me that it closed 20 years ago! (She exaggerates as it is more like 15). But I wonder if I am alone in this happening? I wonder if a town centre re-development can throw others off too where they more then miss how it used to be?

Another strange thing is that I can be thinking of a scene where at first I think where it is, but then realize it was on a game I used to play via a past games system that I no longer have... Or a past online game etc.

It makes me think that we can even miss or have memories of places that we were not physically there!


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Mountain Goat
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Veteran

Joined: 13 May 2019
Gender: Male
Posts: 14,202
Location: .

04 May 2020, 4:08 pm

I remember as a young child where we used to make a small eyehole in a shoe box, and decorate the box to make it look like a room (Colour it in etc) and from the top while the viewer looked at the scene we would drop a little ghost in made from paper or card and probably fastened to a pencil to drop it down... Just a fun thing. Is just a fun past memory of what we used to do as children for our amusement!


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