Chris Deacy interviewed by Pamela Petro

The tables were turned on me for this week’s Nostalgia Interviews podcast – as I am the guest. Pamela Petro, who did such a fantastic interview with me earlier in 2021, asks me about my background (and we talk about why I don’t sound Welsh), why I used to emulate great radio presenters and newsreaders and why I ended up in academia if I always wanted to be on the radio.

I talk about my career path, the dream that never went away, the bridge between broadcasting and teaching, and how this all dovetailed during lockdown when I would record my lectures like doing a radio show.

I talk about my first university memory and recount my memories of the first day at Lampeter, which dovetailed with buying a bed for my sister, and why I came close to crying. Friday 4 October 1991 was the beginning of the rest of my life.

Pamela asks me what the song is that sums up my student days (the answer may surprise you), and I talk about the 1992 Lampeter Arts Hall Christmas disco when I danced really badly to the Human League and how it led to a particularly memorable experience at the Quarry club in Lampeter the following Tuesday…

I discuss how I wasn’t in a good place 5 or 6 years ago and, through my work on Nostalgia, I have wanted to return to the prosaic, humdrum stuff from my undergraduate days and to say thank you to those friends from that era, and how one episode in particular was the template for me becoming involved with student support many years later.

I then talk about my diaries and how and why I have been annotating my past, and what it says about the difference between experience and memory. I refer to the diary as being a corrective against having a rose-coloured lens reading of the past. We also talk about what makes Lampeter special by virtue of what for other people might be its perceived limitations.

We then focus on the role of memoir and finding a way to connect a personal story to universal experiences. Specifically, I talk about why the diary became a form of salvation after I met somebody in 2016 who didn’t turn out to be who she promised to be, and the diary turned me into a detective in my own story. I talk about how the diary is both primary source, secondary source and work in progress.

The interview finishes with me being asked what I would do if God gave me the chance to satisfy one desire!