William Trevor on nostalgia; first childhood home

Going back sets nostalgia right; time-worn impressions are corrected. Going back is a lesson in proportion, an exercise in give-and-take, more revelation than deja vu. Sixty years on, Mitchelstown has a beaten look that memory has failed to register, its shops economically squat, its skyline humble beneath the mountains that make it seem as if someone has sat on it. The woman in the chemist's remembers my mother. The town's doing well, the proprietor of a drapery and footwear business says, but even so the jobs in the bacon factory and the creameries aren't enough to go around. All the time the population's increasing.
— William Trevor, The County Cork