All that time between the future and the past

For me it was the videophone.

That was what the future was all about and when that arrived we’d be right in the thick of it with the flying cars and instant food machines and robot servants. It would be amazing.

I’m not sure how, in 1988, I thought the videophone would be so revolutionary that it would make life so much more fantastic. I can only guess it was because it seemed so ridiculously advanced from the rotary phones we used then and the 3 digit phone numbers that made them work.

And now, in 2017, we’ve had videophone capability for years and it’s not been quite the breakthrough I imagined. To put it bluntly, it’s terrible. When someone tries to contact me with a video call my first reaction is to hurl the phone into the nearest waterway. Being able to see a person on the other side of the world as they talk to you hasn’t made life better. It’s just made things awkward and weird.

It’s like seeing a high school friend from 20 years ago and both forgetting their name and realising the years have been far kinder to their physical appearance than they have been to you. This absolutely precludes either useful of interesting conversation and leaves both parties feeling less happy than they were before. Generally speaking (it should go without saying) the video calling thing is a dud.

So if I could say this to my optimistic 12-year-old self, as I read the school journal about videophones and my eyes rolled back in their sockets thinking of the wondrous future, it would be this: be careful.

It can go the other way, too. You can have your eyes rolling back in tongue-lolling delirium about the past. That’s called nostalgia. Even as I was salivating about the future I was regretting I wasn’t part of the past, more specifically my parents’ past.

The one where they didn’t have television, were paid in pennies for their chores and the naughtiest but best thing any kid could ever do was raid Mrs Winklestein’s plum tree while she had her afternoon sleep.

Back then school was mostly the place you went to swap your sandwiches for pie lids, creeks were jam-packed with eels and whitebait and your short pockets were always full of gobstoppers, whatever they were.

The olden days have always represented a time of near anarchic freedom to me and who wouldn’t be annoyed about missing that?

But my nostalgia doesn’t include such things as corporal punishment, of children being seen and not heard or of the frequent death of people from diseases we laugh about today.

There were other deficiencies too. My own mother left home for boarding school at the age of 13 and after that only came back three or four times a year, despite living just half an hour’s drive away.

That tells me a few things, the first being a worrying subservience to institutional rules and the second and third being the state of both our roads and our cars. It also speaks of a social coldness that could even allow this to be acceptable.

Because though I left home at 18 and was glad for it, I can certainly remember it wasn’t easy and it was a far from comfortable transition. Had I been forced to do it five years earlier I might have ended up quite peculiar. Which I must note here is something my own mother has been fortunate enough to avoid.

I sometimes wonder if my son, perhaps acting on some genetic memory he has had no option but to take from me, will have the same thoughts as me.

Whether he will look back at my childhood in the 1980s as one that was more liberated and full of natural goodness than his own. Or whether he will look into the future with a marvelling optimism for the arrival of an arbitrary point that tells him it has arrived and he is right there in the middle of that better world.

I’ll try not to glorify my past for him, if that helps, because I genuinely don’t believe it was any better than things are now and in many, many respects, things are extraordinarily superior these days. And it may get better as more and more inventions are pressed into the service of our lives and so there is nothing wrong with a bit of optimism.

But I guess what this is getting at is whether you’re neck deep in the past or goggle-eyed about the future there are some things that have always been best on the day that they happen.

And by that I mean at the end of a long week, sitting down for a hot Sunday dinner with your friends and asking whose turn it was to bring the pudding.