NOSTALGIA IS STILL WHAT IT USED TO BE!

I have been on a bit of a nostalgia trip just recently. I put it down to a number of things: my age, early fifties, time on my hands due to medical redundancy and a lack of good entertainment around.

I was sharing a melancholy moment with my wife. We were having one of those conversations that marks your progression to a new way of looking at life: looking back. It certainly seems that the older one gets the more one will look back to times gone by. It is part of accepting that the bulk of your life has been led and you are approaching the last stretch on the journey of life. My wife and I were watching punk Britannia at the time. We discussed what we were like in those days, the places that we went to, the gigs, the post punk indie scene and the simplicity of things then in comparison to now. Just like the hippies in the generation before us we thought that our generation would change the world: then again when you are in your late teens you still have a lot to learn about how things are done. Living brings experience and knowledge and your young dreams are dashed.

Like a lot of married couples we only get time together at the weekends. As we don’t go out much we usually sit together and watch any programmes that we have recorded during the week, or go on Netflix or an online streaming media site or You-tube. The summer never seems to be a good time for TV scheduling so we have been watching You-tube a lot. We started to look for things that we enjoyed in the past, such as Thriller from the 1970s, The Prisoner, Red Dwarf and such. It is when you watch these again years after the first time that you realise how quickly things have changed in the world around us.

    

We both recalled when watching thriller that we were both in our early teens and it was a treat to get to stay up to watch it. Perhaps that is why we have both held fond memories of it all our lives. The first thing that you notice now when you watch it is how low- tech the 1970s were. We were amused by the casting of thriller, which always had an American star (to boost US sales no doubt) and was awash with middle class accents. Actually it is more accurate to say RADA accents.

 The houses were always enormous and the plots generally featured a character, often but not always a young woman that was being driven insane by someone else who wanted revenge or an inheritance or to control a business. I must stress I am not putting the programme down because it has so much charm and innocence that is not in many programmes today. There was no profanity or abusive language, although the 1970s attitude towards women was still fairly Neanderthal. We then thought that it would be fun to look at some of the childrens programmes that we grew up with, and fun it most definitely was! We watched episodes of the Banana Splits, Timeslip, Worzel Gummidge, Catweazle and have saved many others in to our favourites for future weekends.

It is strange looking back, not just at the entertainment but the news, technology, fashions and attitudes and also glimpsing a life that had enough “mod cons” to make life comfortable but was not overwhelmed with technology and machinery as life is today, sometimes to the point of claustrophobia. We need to leave space in our lives to fill with being human, interpersonal, and driven by something more than personal gratification. Looking back can reminds me of happy, carefree days when I had no responsibilities and was safe pretty much wherever I went. I have to admit, I wouldn’t want to be a kid growing up nowadays.

How the world has changed, particularly for children. Even their entertainment is more adult than it should be and sex and image and dreaming of stardom are pushed at them. Gone are the days of programmes that would provide a set of moral values. Crime and criminals are made to look cool instead of being vilified and made to pay for their actions. Parents are no longer portrayed as being caring and protecting, more and more often parents are shown to be either a waste of space (ie a drunk or a junkie) or not caring or out of touch and even abusive. Is this how it really is?

Having said that I have to follow that by saying “God bless the Internet” and services like You-tube that can take us on a trip down memory lane and relieve us of the stress of modern living. When I look back I don’t do so with a sense of loss or regret, it doesn’t make me sad: it fills me with a warm glow of contentment because my past is a place that I can visit and relive the feelings associated with the programme, the era and my experiences then and bring them in to the present to savour. I also see my role as a parent to provide love and protection and education. It is up to those of us that grew up with a set of values and a moral compass to lead the way forward for the next generation by ensuring that what we had will not be completely lost.

It is said that the past is a foreign country, but really it is a databank of memories, feelings, associations and lessons learned. The past should not be forgotten: it has a role to play in the present and the future.