I imagine it’s inevitable that, as one gets older, one becomes more nostalgic, unless you had a difficult life of course then you’re unlikely to enjoy looking back. But assuming you’ve had what you might call an average life to this point, you know some good bits and some bad bits, then there is likely to be at least an element of nostalgia that is welcome. I’ve based a few retirement blogs on this concept but now I notice I’m becoming a bit more prone to such mental meanderings.
It makes total sense in one way. These are fairly depressing times if you let them be, (not that I mind a pandemic to an extent), so retreating to a kinder age (what used to be called a perceived golden age) fits the bill. Things were so much better in those days. They weren’t of course but right now it suits me to idly speculate that they were. So in answer to the question in the title, I’d say nostalgia is at least what it used to be and maybe more.
With me this nostalgia has recently taken the form of watching old movies – we’ve just worked through the 5 Dirty Harry movies, 3 Godfathers and several incarnations of Sherlock Holmes. I can’t really call this latter a return to nostalgia as Sherlock has always been with me. Watching this last week a modern version Enola Holmes from Netflix, I understood why I preferred the old versions.
If I want old radio programmes, and nothing is more nostalgic than these, there’s Radio 4 extra with any number of the comedy programmes I used to lap up at 2 o’ clock on a Sunday lunchtime in my childhood. The list is endless – Hancock’s Half Hour; Round the Horne; Beyond Our Ken and so on. Even the Goons although when I listened again to these programmes I didn’t think they had stood the test of time but then much comedy doesn’t. Much though not all, Monty Python excepted.
Inevitably there has been some revisiting of our old record albums. The absence of any jazz playing or even listening, has left a void which we (admittedly more Mrs Summerhouse) have filled a bit with our old West Coast sounds – Eagles, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt and several others. I still have all our old cassette tapes and you don’t get more foolishly nostalgic than trying to play these, which I do on occasions.
Even if I haven’t actually played them I’ve been thinking fondly of them. To the point of digging out some of the old sheet music tunes I used to play back in the days before jazz piano came along. Only this morning I tried to breathe life into The Pretender (Jackson Browne), So Begins the Task (Stephen Stills), It’s Different for Girls (not at all west coast more East End) and Is She Really Going Out With Him, Joe Jackson, Brothers in Arms (Dire Straits), Sister Golden Hair (America). That kind of thing.
As for my reading material, I’ve already fessed up to a bit of a recent addiction to ghost stories (all set in the past of course) but I’ve said that before so I’ll say no more. In a way going back to Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Raymond Chandler, Georges Simeon doesn’t really count either as a ‘retreat to’ because I’ve never stopped reading this genre. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a comfort there.
We haven’t retreated to the 70s for our comedy. I mean nobody could pretend that this was a socially or economically, golden age. So Only Fools and Horses, The Two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise remain, while readily available, untouched by me. Dad’s Army holds up well I think but Hi de Hi, Are you being served? etc, I’d have to be very desperate for a bit of nostalgia to go there. I suppose when I start finding pleasure in these offerings I will know that my healthy nostalgia has tipped into morbid head-burying. Not literally of course.
Or even worse I might begin to dig out my 70s clothes. The bell bottoms / loons I used to wear then would still fit perfectly providing I turned them upside down. Or worse still from Mrs Summerhouse’s point of view old favourites meal-wise – chicken in a basket and then the sophisticated heights of ‘spag bol’, Vesta curry, chicken supreme, Angel Delight. No that’s not going to fly, I cannot bring myself to hanker after these latter synthetic creations.
And that’s not to mention the old drinks – Liebfraumilch, Blue Nun, vodka and lime, brandy and ginger, Double Diamond, Watney’s Red Barrel (sounding like Monty Python now), Babycham and Cherry B although the last two not for me.
I confess to having a big hankering for old cars. Not the flash ones, the E types, Aston Martins, TR7s but rather the ones I actually had – a Renault 4 with 3 gears and the gear stick on the dashboard(it was yellow and purple – hand-painted, now that’s a colour-scheme, the picture above is as close as I could get), an old mini 1275 GT, the Alfa Sud (the one that dumped Mrs Summerhouse, the two children and I on a snowy night in Headingley just after the Yorkshire Ripper had left one of his victims behind the Arndale Centre by which we had to pass). Maybe not the Alfa Sud then. But strange choices like the Austin 1100, the Cortina, the Morris 1000 convertible which we actually owned.
Now that was a driving experience. Because it was a convertible it kind of sagged in the middle (no roof to strengthen it) which meant the doors didn’t really shut properly. They used to fly open (a bit like Herbie Flies Again) when it went over a pot hole. Mrs SH, for it was her Christmas present from me, used to drive it with ropes tied round each arm attached to the door handles that were thankfully sound. I think we sold it for £250 and the number of phone calls we had before and after it was sold was remarkable.
Who was it said, ‘the past is foreign country, they do things differently there’? How true. I think we let it go too cheap. Ah yes, those were the days (my friend) Mary Hopkins. Stop it now. That’s enough nostalgia for one day.
*As coincidence would have it the same night I wrote this blog about nostalgia we watched Simon Sharma’s documentary The Romantics and Us, about – nostalgia. Strange that. He was saying that, while at one extreme, it can lead to unhealthy nationalism, at its best it provides great comfort in times of national stress. At least I believe that was what he said. If so, no wonder I’m dabbling with nostalgia at these challenging times.