In this final chapter I want to present a personal account of how I came to reflect on many of the issues addressed in this book: the dominant historical and theoretical narrative concerning language in Liverpool; possible alternatives to the prevailing story; interest in ‘local’ language; the creation and forging of Scouse; the ways in which Scouse has been used within popular culture; and the creation of a cultural identity around Scouse. There are two dangers in this approach. The first is that my own experience will be presented or taken as typical, and the second is that of nostalgia. In the first regard, I hope it will be clear that my account is designed simply to present a journey to a number of questions that I think are of more than personal significance. People move, but they do so in space and history; if that were not the case, then much of the following chapter would be neither more nor less interesting than a snippet of memoir, but I think that the personal presentation helps to explain how a number of the issues that I consider in the book arose. With regard to nostalgia, it's fair to say that there is a lot of it about in relation to Liverpool, and some of its results are pretty awful: rose-tinted recollections of organic communities in which Scousers stood together against the world and its evils, or ahistorical accounts of the glories of ‘our Liverpool’ and its achievements. Such narratives retain a sense of the past only by eliding history itself, and their flaws are evident. But as the OED entry indicates, ‘nostalgia’ is a nuanced word that has two main senses which don't always complement each other. The older sense of the term dates from the mid eighteenth century and relates to a sense of place, specifically home (the Greek root νόστος meant ‘return home’): ‘acute longing for familiar surroundings, esp. regarded as a medical condition; homesickness’.