Monday 3 June 2013

Nostalgia - Is It What It Used To Be?

According to the tinternet nostalgia is 'a sentimentality for the past,typically for a place or period with happy associations'. And I know I may well be viewing it through rose tinted glasses but I love it. I don't want to read about the bombings in Afghanistan or how our elected and non elected representatives are still being caught with their hands in the till as that makes me feel both helpless and hopeless, I would far rather be musing on what it was like waiting for the 'popman' when I was little - dispensing his brightly coloured sugary liquid in refundable bottles from the back of a flat bed truck. You can still get Ben Shaws but I've only seen it in cans recently - not in dimpled glass bottles and I don't know of anywhere that still has a 'pop man'. I don't think we even have a milkman anymore on our road.

My Nana used to keep her choices of Cream Soda and Sasparilla (nasty stuff then but I quite like it now) along with a couple of bottles of lemonade lined up by the back door. If you were really lucky you also got ice in it - ice from a metallic tray which always seemed incredibly reluctant to give up it's icy cold goodness so invariably you just has tepid pop instead. But tepid pop was better than no pop or worse still 'corporation pop' as my Grandad used to call tap water. Today's pernicious and ubiquitous Coke and Pepsi weren't for consumption in the home but for special treats when out and about - I used to feel very grown up if we went to a cafe and I got Coke in a glass with ice and a straw. And if I got a Coke Float or a Lemonade Float - pop with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in the top I was in seventh heaven - though on reflection that may have just been a sugar rush....

The only other time I got a straw to drink through was on the rare occasions we went to the Wimpy and I had one of their delicious strawberry milkshakes and I was told under no circumstances was I to blow back through the straw to make more bubbles. So the trick was to do it really quietly and carefully so you got bubbles but they didn't pop loudly or splash over the side of the glass.....plus IIRC it was made from milk and Crusha - a thick concentration of sugar and fruit flavour though it might also have had some carmines in it, not especially healthy but nowhere near as unhealthy as the ingredients in a modern day McDonalds milkshake I'm sure. Though I must be honest - one of their chocolate milkshakes if you have a hangover makes you feel loads better - must be all the chemicals in it.......  

I love looking at old things - the Robert Opie Scrapbooks of each decade are nostalgia porn for me, I get all misty eyed and glowy even looking at things I have no direct memory of. My Dad always says to me when I start waxing lyrical about something of yesteryear 'you were born in the wrong decade and how can you possibly like that - you weren't even born then? '. And he's right in a way but also not - I'm very grateful to have been born when and where I am - I have the vote, access to reliable and reasonably safe contraception, let alone access to the Health Service, I was also one of the last lucky few to get a full grant to enable me to take advantage of higher education without having to mire myself in debt ( a godsend for those of us not lucky enough to have been born to financially affluent parents) and thanks to the wonders of the tinternet I can comfortably look back  at yesteryear stuff, it reminds me of though I hesitate to use this phrase 'a kinder, gentler time' because luckily - that's exactly what it was for me. I still play vinyl, use film cameras (the oldest one I have is a Kodak Vest Pocket from the 1920's which still works perfectly fine) and I have a valve radio from the late 1950's - it and its attendant hum are truly beautiful.

Long live the past and all its beautiful nostalgic glories........