Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Charles Musselwhite, Professor in Psychology at Aberystwyth. Charles is a specialist in gerontology with a particular focus on how people engage with place in terms of age. He first went to Lampeter to study Archaeology and Charles talks about how that experience underpinned what he thinks now. We learn that he prefers a bottom up approach to his research, asking how someone lives their life and we learn how, for example, transport is more about people than vehicles. After Lampeter Charles went to Southampton to study Psychology and later did a PhD looking at how young boy racers change in their lifetime. We look at the role of nostalgia vis-a-vis the people that Charles interviews, and the views that older people who are housebound see from their windows. Charles also talks about how the most interesting bits in people’s lives are often the everyday and ordinary ones rather than the extraordinary events. He grew up near Portsmouth, his parents were teachers, and Charles remembers