This week I would like to ban nostalgia. Harsh, I know, as we all have a past, and most of us seem to view it as a lovely, glowing country with long, hot summers and snowy Christmas mornings and the simple fun of conkers and marbles. A place where kids could play safely in the streets, everyone ate dinner round a chatter-filled table, communities were bonded together with the spirit of the Blitz, young folk listened to their elders, violence was rare as hen’s teeth, white dog shit baked on sticky black tarmac and we all went to the coast for our holidays. A lovely place then, the past. And it isn’t the past I would ban. The past is fine, the past is good. It’s nostalgia I would ban.
Nostalgia is a sickness. The word actually comes from the Greek algos, which means pain or ache or sickness, and nostos, which means to return home. An odd kind of sickness, then. A sickness that makes you think the past is a better place than where you are. People who drone on about how good things used to be (and let’s not forget this even afflicts really young people who look back on the late 1990s as a Golden Era) are simply people who can’t live in the present. Scared, they are, of rapid change, and guilty of selective memory. They are walking forwards while looking backwards. Technology and anything new makes them queasy and melancholic for the olden days. Crime seems to be bursting through their front doors and drugs are everywhere. Play them new music and it sounds, to them, like someone else they used to listen to, just not as good. Show them a good TV show and they wax lyrical on the golden age when we all watched the same thing and could all talk about it in the morning.
Well, that was crap. I remember when we only had three TV channels (well, two really as BBC2 was mainly educational, dull stuff we never watched). Most TV back then was shit: This Is Your Life, Coronation Street, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, Robin’s Nest, Crossroads, Mike Yarwood, Little and Large. It was fucking awful. The occasional bit of genius did not stem the enormous tide of crap. And for every Sweeney then, there is The Wire and The Shield now. For every Fawlty Towers, a Curb Your Enthusiasm. The reason we all talked about telly was because there was nothing else to talk about. Now, you can watch what you want when you want. You can even, if you really are stuck on the good old days, watch all the old crap over and over again. It’s a win-win for you, but still the moaners carry on moaning. Don’t they remember when the whole thing shut down at midnight and we all went to bed?
But communities lived together then, helping each other out. I don’t remember this either, so I looked into it. During the Blitz the community spirit was so strong that after bombing raids on the East End, thieves often went round and ransacked the bomb-damaged houses. What kind of shithouse trick is that? I don’t think that would happen today. And the women of Britain were so loyal they shagged Americans for nylons and sugar while their husbands and boyfriends were off fighting the Nazis! That’s community spirit for you.
Even fashion is cursed with rose-tinted spectacles. Almost every year we see a revival of some sort, and half the population walk around looking like mods from the 60s or Britpop lads or 80s dance kids. And that’s because they can: anything you want, style-wise, if you’ve got the money, you can buy. In the good old days it used to be hunt around for a shop that might, just might sell something which looked almost right, and if you lived outside London or the big cities: forget it. Now kids can style themselves however they please. It’s better, it offers more freedom of expression and it means you don’t have to be minted to look good.
Eating out was limited, too. It was the chip shop, the Chinese or an Indian if you lived almost anywhere outside London and weren’t rich enough to afford the few high-class restaurants around. Toilets stank. Cars were heavy and slow and broke down all the time, holidays were breaks to the coast (if you could even afford an actual holiday) and hardly anyone could afford to fly. Nowadays, you can talk to people on the phone as you walk down the street, order books and food delivered to your front door, your kid’s headmaster can’t cane him for being cheeky, if you fail the 11-plus you aren’t instantly written off as a half-wit loser, almost anyone can get into University and waste three years on the piss (not just posh or brainy kids) and if you have any questions you can just Google them. If you get cancer now it doesn't mean you're definitely going to die. It did back then.
The past wasn’t better, it was different. Now is good. If it wasn’t for Global Warming, the economic meltdown, over-population, food shortages and new disease, Now would be the best time ever to be alive.
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