Does anyone get bittersweet pangs of nostalgia?

[Lencoboy]

Although this isn't necessarily fuelled by pangs of nostalgia per se, I've been looking at some old archived threads from 2001 and 2002 on the Digital Spy forum (in the 'General Discussion' sub-section which has been defunct to new threads/posts since late March 2021) when said site/forum was in it's very early years and my general emotions about revisiting those distant times in 'textual' form were 'mixed' at best.

Part of me now looks back on said period (early 2000s) as still being a relatively simpler and more carefree time compared to the latter half of that same decade and beyond, but there were still elements of concerns and cynicism expressed by certain FMs there even back then; e.g, fears about the then-newer media/technologies potentially corrupting youngsters, despite being only just 2-3 years at the very least before the first-ever social media platforms (a la Facebook) were established, concerns about out-of-control youngsters/ASB, certain FMs bemoaning the Daily Mail and the like (for obvious reasons), even bashing the Queen's Jubilee pop concert in the June of that year, etc, etc. A lot of which it seems isn't just confined to today's seemingly increasingly cynical culture then, which I actually find quite reassuring in a kind of 'twas ever thus' context.

However, I do feel a bit of a sense of sadness over certain shops that were still significant staples of our high streets back then that were also mentioned in some threads, especially stores selling old-school audio-visual, photographic and electronic equipment (a la Dixons, Tandy, Maplin, Jessops, etc) that are sadly no more and largely lost to the world of 'online'. I really loved the electronic equipment 'smells' in a lot of those stores as mentioned in another thread about favourite logos and the like.

On to 2003 now.

[Lencoboy]

Currently on March 2005.

Around this time there were a lot of discussions on DS about Bird Flu and even some links to the BBC site where there were fears of a possible 'pandemic' being expressed at the time.

Quite prophetic in some ways considering what was to come some 15 years later that we're still continuing to feel certain impacts of right now, plus of course there was also the Swine Flu pandemic 4 years later in 2009, which fortunately never seemed to wreak the same havoc as Covid just over a decade later.

God, how naive I still was about many things even as late as 2005, though of course ignorance was still largely bliss for me at that time, but that Bird Flu scare at the time luckily, however, happened to be much ado about nothing in the end.